"The Soul of Money"

Reading from The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

"We are all blind in some way about money, and we keep ourselves blind. Perhaps it is the fear and anxiety that if we see too much about the consequences of the ways we are earning it, or the real consequences of the choices we make with our spending, we will have to redesign our whole lives. If we really look into, for example, the brutality of child labor that is often associated with everyday products we buy at low cost from foreign countries, we would be shocked and immobilized. If we acknowledged the true environmental costs that we pay for the gift of seemingly limitless energy required to maintain our comfort, how would we need to change? If we really looked at the consequences and downstream impact of almost any industry that employs us or serves our wants and needs, the truth is we might be stopped in our everyday life. And if we really examined our beliefs and assumptions about other people in the context of money, we might need to open ourselves, our hearts, and our minds to people we have closed off from ourselves."

Sermon

I once heard a friend of mine talking about what it takes to change the world. She was describing a hot day in June or July when she and a group of teenagers first set eyes on the overgrown vacant lot that they were going to turn into an urban farm, right in the heart of Boston. For months, she and the other organizers had been getting permits from the city, raising money to hire teenagers to help them, thinking about how it would all happen. And now, finally, she and about a dozen young people were here. She asked them to take a moment to look at the lot. It was a hot day, breathless in the city. The heat shimmered up from the pavement in waves. Cracked sidewalks, sagging fences. The lot was weedy, full of trash, litter, broken glass. Then she asked them, can you imagine what it will look like when we are through cleaning it up, and you all come back in the spring to plant this farm?

Can you imagine? She asked. It was a moment of possibility and promise. It was a moment when she asked a big question. It was a breathless moment.

And then one of the teenagers said, Nope. No way. I don’t know what you all could have been thinking, to get us out here early on a Saturday morning as if we could make this trash heap into something better. All I see is weeds, trash and weeds.

Have you been there? Have you been full of promise and hope, and have you asked someone to imagine it with you, and held your breath to see if they will say yes to you, and say yes to life and hard work, and then gotten the big no?

Maybe this is not a good question to ask in an election week, or to ask in this election week, in particular.

Because I can still see my friend – her name is Pat Gray, and she changed my life – I can still see her and those teenagers, hot in the city, thinking about all the work it’s going to take to make something broken into something beautiful, and just standing back and saying, well, no. Nope. Not gonna happen. No way.

When I think about money, I think about those teenagers in the weeds, and about how something different is possible, and about how hard it is to really imagine a different kind of world around money. How scary that is, for all the reasons Lynne Twist gave in the reading I shared with you earlier. To me, this conversation is not only about the messages about money we’ve been hearing in this church over the past months and years, it’s about how we figure out, as a religious community, how we want to be with each other and how we want to talk about – or not talk about – money in our lives, in our church, and in our world.

What were some of the lessons you first learned about money? Was there enough? Was there never enough? Did your parents talk about it? What did your grandparents have to say?

When I was in elementary school, we lived in Japan, and many American children took jobs as models for Japanese clothing companies. My siblings and I thought this sounded interesting, and we liked the idea of making money, and so we signed with a modeling agency with the memorable name “Daisho Creamy” and took jobs on weekends and after school. The jobs were not very difficult, although they were also not very interesting, and we were extremely well paid, especially because of the favorable exchange rate between yen and dollars at the time. In many ways, it easy money. What I remember about it, as strongly as trying on clothes and having my picture taken, was going to the department store afterwards to buy something with my paycheck: Legos, or a stuffed animal. I remember how nice it felt to have this modeling money set aside – as my money, to choose what to buy or what to save for. I remember how proud I felt to be able to earn money, like a grown up.

Another lesson I learned about money as a child in Japan was not so positive. I remember having some kind of allowance spending money, and being able to buy candy or little gifts with this money on my way home from school. One day, instead of candy, I was taken with a box of beautiful red strawberries for sale at a Japanese grocery store. I wanted to buy two boxes, but when I got to the cash register, I didn’t have enough money for them. I was very embarrassed, but luckily, my parents had taught us to carry extra cash as “emergency money,” so I dug out that emergency money and used it to pay for those beautiful strawberries. When I got home and showed them to my mother, she was shocked and angry. I had paid some crazy price for those strawberries – they were probably 15 dollar strawberries. And I remember feeling very small and foolish. I think we may have tried to take them back, they were that expensive. I was ashamed because I didn’t have enough money, because I didn’t know how much strawberries were supposed to cost, and because something simple and beautiful that I had wanted was something I should never have purchased.

From both of these experiences I learned that money could evoke powerful feelings of both pride and shame in me and my mom – feelings that were powerful at the time, and remain so even now, decades later.

I know you have your stories about growing up around money, too. They can be hard to talk about – especially the times we have felt trapped, limited, cheated, belittled, or ashamed because of money.

As Lynne Twist, a global activist and fundraiser wrote in the reading I shared earlier this morning, money has tremendous power in our lives. She writes,

Rarely in our life is money a place of genuine freedom, joy, or clarity, yet we routinely allow it to dictate the terms of our lives and often be the single most important factor in the decisions we make about work, love, family, and friendship. There is little we accept so completely as the power and authority of money, and assumptions about how we should feel about it. We challenge assumptions about every other facet of life: race, religion, politics, education, sex, family, and society. But when it comes to money, we accept it not only as a measure of economic value but also as away of assigning importance and worthy to everyone and everything else in the world.

Money has tremendous power in our lives and in our world – power we have given it – and today I want to talk about how we can get that power back.

But before I get there, let me take you back to the weeds for a moment, back to the teenagers starting an urban farm in a vacant lot in Boston. Because what happened next was pretty profound.

Whoever answered, whoever said, you’re crazy, lady, well, he did say that, but he didn’t walk away. After all, he’d gotten up that morning, got on the bus or walked down the cracked sidewalk or driven in his car all the way over, and he thought the project was doomed but he still picked up his hoe and got to work.

And do you know what happened next? All that morning, and all the next day, they chopped weeds, and hauled barrels of trash, and brought in truckloads of compost. Day after day they kept at it, as if something better was possible, as if they could make a difference, drop by drop. And by and by, the day came when a new crop of teenagers came out to the formerly vacant lot, and saw the tomatoes greening and the squash putting out flowers, as if it had always been this way.

Then, they could see it. Then, they understood what they had been working for all that time. A vision of a future they hadn’t even thought to imagine.

It was easy to say no in the weeds. But it got a lot harder to say no in the garden... It was a lot harder to say no in the garden.

In fact, once I’d been to the garden, it got harder for me to say no to a lot of conversations of possibility in my life – because I’d seen that change was possible.

Over the past eight years or so, I have had long discussions with my family, my friends, my colleagues, my peers about how we can change the way we think, feel, and act about money in our lives. It has been hard, exciting, and powerful. One of the decisions my family and I have made because of all these conversations is what I think of as a garden move – a move of openness, possibility, and hope – in the way we are moving more of our money to the causes we believe in most. One of those causes is this community, so we are pledging a percentage of our income – this year it is 5% - to the life-changing mission of this congregation.

Park of this practice, part of pulling myself out of the weeds and getting some of the power I’ve given money back again, requires breaking a strong social taboo of silence about money. I’d like all our Harry Potter fans to stay with me for a moment while I explain why breaking this taboo has been so important. In the very first Harry Potter book, the characters all have trouble saying the name of the evil wizard who has killed Harry’s parents. They call him “You Know Who.” Everyone avoids saying it except for Dumbledore, the head of Hogwarts, himself a wise and powerful wizard and also Harry’s friend. Dumbledore uses Voldemort’s name on purpose, because it denies the evil wizard, the power of mystery and secrecy. The kind of culture I want to build is one that thinks seriously before giving money that kind of power all the time: the power to be that-which-is-not-named, the power to be thought of and used and banked and withdrawn and never named, never spoken aloud.

I think many of you have been making garden moves with your resources this fall, as well. And not just this fall – last year and the year before, when this congregation came to you and said, this is a time of transition for us, and possibility, and that takes time, and talent, and that takes money. Maybe they said, we can see something new on the horizon – a building, a minister – and we want you to help us make it possible. And so many of you said YES to that vision, and you said YES again this fall, even when the economy continued to be terrible, and even when you were worried about your job and your 401(k) and even when you were paying for school and even when you were paying rent or a mortage in what has got to be the most expensive place to live outside of Tokyo. No, really. You said YES. You said, hand me a hoe. You said, here’s my check, and it’s more than I’ve ever given anyone before and it makes me a little scared to give it away but giving it away makes me feel powerful and whole, too, and so I want you to have it. You said, I love this community and I have no money and I want to chair this committee. I want to do more and take on more for these people, for this faith. You said, I see some more weeds over here, over in this part of the yard by the wall, by the ivy and the fence. You said, come on. Let’s go.

And to you I say, again, always, incredibly: Thank you.

A grassroots organizer named Tina Cincotti wrote an article last year in the Grassroots Fundraising Journal in which she said,

"U.S. culture is riddled with taboos about money—it"s something polite people just aren’t supposed to talk about. So, what does that say about [grassroots fundraisers,] those of us who are not only talking about money but also asking you for some of yours?

Here’s what it says to me, [wrote Tina]: It says we will not play by these rules. It says we will not allow a system that has created such a vastly unequal distribution of wealth to go unchallenged. It says that we are proud of the life-changing work that we are doing, and that we need money to do the work, and that we aren’t afraid to ask for it. Fundraising doesn’t support political work; fundraising is political work. Fundraising doesn’t support organizing; fundraising is organizing. Fundraising doesn’t support movement building; fundraising is movement building.

And that is part of the reason why I am asking you to talk about money, and why I am asking you for some of yours. To paraphrase Tina, Talking about money doesn’t support organizing; it is organizing. Talking about money doesn’t support movement building; it is movement building.

As Lynne Twist wrote, in a sentence I think was aimed like an arrow straight at the heart of our liberal religious community,

“We challenge assumptions about every other facet of life: race, religion, politics, education, sex, family, and society. But when it comes to money, we accept it not only as a measure of economic value but also as away of assigning importance and worthy to everyone and everything else in the world.”

Tough words from a tough lady. But the good news is -- it doesn’t have to be this way. There are examples of people in all cultures and all times who have struggled to imagine with the world as should be instead of the world as it is, who have struggled with a wider culture they found insufficient to becoming the kind of people they wanted to be. Among these people is a Unitarian minister named William Henry Channing, who wrote the following words about 3,000 miles away from here, about 150 years ago:

To live content with small means
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly
To listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never,
To let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common,

This is to be my symphony.

Talking about money honestly– talking about who has it, who doesn’t, what it makes possible and what it forecloses – is not easy. But it is powerful. It is a beginning. It can lead us to big and important changes, in our lives and in our world. And it can help us name each one of our powerful individual fears, the fears about money we learned as children or feel every day as adults struggling in so many ways. We can name those fears and somehow find, again and again, a way to make garden moves, a way to say YES to our dreams and hopes, a way to come on back to claiming our collective courage,– the kind of courage that lights up the darknest night, warms the loneliest hearts, sparks the biggest ideas. It is the light of that counter-cultural courage that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

May it be so.