Sermon: Money and the Meaning of Life

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“Money and the Meaning of Life”^[1]

By Charles Rush

October 23, 2005

is one of the substantial ironies of our adult lives that we spend the first half of it worrying about making enough money and, if we are relatively successful, worrying the second half of our adult lives what we should do with it. Money is not, as it turns out, juxtaposed to spirituality. It is an instrument that expresses our Spiritual selves.

Now it is possible to ignore the question of the spiritual dimension of money but we do it at our peril. Walker Percy has a character in one of his novels that has reached middle age, a successful Wall Street lawyer, who has managed to retire early, and has been living outside of Asheville, North Carolina. His beautiful and spacious second home is now his primary home and now he doesn't have to work any more so he has plenty of time to pursue his avocation golf. He has a 5 handicap and a very interesting group of friends that regularly play together and enjoy one another's company.

But Will Barrett gets odder and odder, to himself and to his friends. He first notices this when he is laying in a sand trap, looking at the world upside down, just over the rim of the trap itself. He is laying there smelling something burnt in the air and he doesn't get up right away because his mind goes back to High School and the same burnt smell that he remembered one afternoon Senior year when he was talking in a field with Marcy Bernstein. They sat next to one another in honors Math and honors English all throughout High School and probably never exchanged more than 20 words directly. All those years he had watched her as the curve in her hip had grown more inviting and here they were Senior year with High School almost over and she was finally speaking to him and he wanted to speak back and ask her to do something… anything… She was asking him what he was doing that summer and describing her plans… and he wanted to go where she was going… but he couldn't find the words and suddenly she was gone… and that was that.

He is lying in the sand trap, completely enrapt in the past when his foursome help him to his feet and ask what is wrong. He can't answer them because he doesn't really know, except that it seems to him that everything around him is a farce. The cocktail hour after golf is a farce, listening to his friends and their wives is a farce. He keeps going through the motions of his life, caught away on this things from the past, and all of them are visions of things that got away, of missed opportunities.

His daughter is about to be married soon and that seems like a farce to, the plans leading up to the day, all of the etiquette that attends weddings, all the social detail that one has to think about. He is not depressed, he is having a spiritual crisis of meaning, and he finds himself one Saturday afternoon, sitting in the front seat of his Mercedes smelling the leather on the front seat and then smelling the gun oil from the barrel of his luger, going back and forth between the two, wondering what the point of living really is.

How did he get to this impasse? After a successful career, at the time when he should be enjoying his personal time, he feels like his life and perhaps all of life is just a farce? How did he get to this place where he finally has time for an internal conversation and he finds that no one is home, there is nothing significant happening there?

For part of the answer, we turn to Donald Trump, who writes the following in his reflections on life in "The Art of the Deal".[i]

"I wake up most mornings very early and spend the first hour or so of each day reading the morning newspapers. I usually arrive at my office by nine in the morning and I get on the phone. There's rarely a day with fewer than fifty calls, and often it runs to over a hundred. In between, I have at least a dozen meetings. The majority occur on the spur of the moment, and few of them last longer than fifteen minutes. I rarely stop for lunch. I leave my office by 6:30, but I frequently make calls from home until midnight, and all weekend long. It never stops. I wouldn't have it any other way."

"I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That is how I get my kicks.[ii]My attention span is short. Instead of being content when everything is going fine, I start getting impatient and irritable. So I look for more and more deals to do. On a day in which I've got several good ones in the works and the phone calls and faxes are going back and forth and the tension is palpable- well, at those times I feel the way other people do when they are on vacation."[iii]

I could suggest that our wider business culture not only tolerates obsessive and compulsive behavior, it actually encourages and rewards it but that is actually a different sermon. What is significant about the Donald is how many of us have so much in common with him.

In the career phase of our life, we work hard at being occupied and the more successful we become we become more and more occupied with bigger issues, more important people, wider ranging power. As a generation, we have chosen to structure our children's lives with sports activities and enrichment opportunities so that our weekend's become exercises in Air Traffic Control with cell phones replacing Pilot head sets. An enormous amount of cell phone conversation is geographically logisitical. "I'm walking up to Penn Station." People everywhere are checking in with their spouses, describing their location, coordinating the next destination. "I'll get Billy while you're with Emma and the baby." During the academic year, we hear the same cry over and over that there is no time.

Inadvertently, we make sure that we do not have significant internal conversations about the meaning of our lives. We are not likely to reflect on 'why we are doing what we are doing'. It is enough to just keep doing it, hopefully better and more successfully. Over a number of years, we can actually experience the irony of an atrophied sense of self and fulfillment as we are becoming more involved and committed on the upwardly mobile path. We find ourselves using money as a way of compensating for this. One day, I'll have time. One day I will be present. It has a way of taking over more and more of our spiritual energy becoming an end in itself in order to support an ever rising standard of living. Like the energizer bunny, it just keeps going and going.

We have to stop every once in a while and assess. At Christ Church, we do this annually by asking you for money. In one sense, we are like National Public Radio interrupting our normal broadcasting so that you can reflect on how important this is to your life and put a dollar amount on that- only we don't have a tote bag or coffee cup.

But I'm thinking about this also on a more central spiritual level. We need to stop every so often and talk with our spouse, talk with our families, talk with ourselves about what is really important in our lives. We need to stop and reflect on how our money is an expression of our spiritual selves. Our wider social world does not encourage this kind of reflection but it is important. Despite our busyness and involvement with succeeding, our lives are fundamentally a spiritual quest, and we need to bring that into focus and remind ourselves of that and talk to each other about that, so that we can keep our priorities in proper line. We need to take notice that they are getting out of line and to reflect on what this is happening.

I give you the figure of Solomon. Solomon was the King after David. It was during his reign that Israel reached the height of their political influence and economic development. By any standard, Solomon was a successful man, certainly he was exposed to the same challenges that we are exposed to with the Donald, and he too had to work out his spirituality in the marketplace, the political counsel, the boardroom.

It is interesting that his pursuit as a young man was not worldly success as such. What he asked God for was wisdom, discernment. He was known for being particularly wise and that was the reputation that followed him after he died. You may recall the story attributed to him that two women came to his court in a dispute over the custody of a child. Both of them claimed to be the boys mother and there was insufficient evidence to determine who was telling the truth, so the case was kicked upstairs to the King. Solomon ordered the child to be cut in half, whereupon one woman fell on the ground and relinquished her claim to the child that it might live.

Solomon awarded her custody of the child for demonstrating by her love and concern for the life of the child that she was indeed her mother.

Solomon constructed not only the Temple which is no more but the Bible records as simply magnificent. He also had a Royal Hall where matters of state were decided and in it were steps that led up to the Royal throne which we also have no more. The Bible says nothing about this throne, but Jewish legend contains a description of it that preserves the legacy of Solomon's wisdom.[iv]

As Solomon ascended the stair to take his seat in the throne each day he passed between several pairs of animals, which had symbolic significance. Wisdom is being able to hold both of these pairs of items in dialectical balance. First he passed between a lion that was paired with an Ox. In the ancient world, the lion was a symbol of the Sun and the Ox was a symbol of the moon. The Sun was used to express those active forces of the universe and the Moon was used to express the passive forces of the universe.

Secondly, he passed between the lamb and the wolf. In the ancient world, the lamb was a symbol of a pure heart, so often used in scripture. The wolf was a symbol of our avaricious passions, always hungry, always on the hunt.

Third, he passed between a goat and a leopard. The goat was a symbol of self-sacrifice; you may recall that on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement the ancient Israelites would pin their sins on a goat and drive it into the wilderness. A leopard was a symbol of aggression, running down the weak and separated from the herd.

Fourth, he passed between an eagle and a peacock. The eagle was a symbol of our quest for majestic transcendence. Eagles were thought to be near the gods and seeing one meant that God was going to bless you. The peacock, then as now, is a symbol of vanity and preening ego.

Fifth, he passed between a falcon and a rooster. In the ancient world, the falcon was a symbol of the spiritually ethereal reasons for which we live, flying so high and elegantly above us. The Rooster viewed as one part aggression and the other part sexual mount, was a symbol of our lust.

Finally, he passed between a hawk and a sparrow. The hawk was a symbol of courage and the sparrow was the embodiment of timidity.

At the top of the throne mount was a gold carving of a Dove sitting atop a Hawk. The Dove, then as now, represented the force of reconciliation, the symbol of the things that make for peace.

Every day, as Solomon ascended to assume the authority of being King, every day as he prepared himself for the responsibility of exercising power, he reminded himself that spiritually, his inner challenge was to reconcile passive and active, a pure heart and appetitive passion, self-sacrifice and aggression, transcendence and vanity, our higher selves and our lust, courage and timidity. These are fundamentally spiritual issues that we daily exercise out of the Throne, the very seat of our self-expression and creativity.

Someone once said to me that you could tell all you essentially needed to know about a person if you could ask them how they handled sex, free time, and money. I'm not going to ask you about your sex life or your free time today so breathe easy. But money is a real mirror that tells us where we really are on the scale between transcendence and vanity, self-sacrifice and aggression, a pure heart and our appetites.

Jesus once said, look to your money for there you shall find your heart also. How we spend, how we invest describes for us who we really are, not who we would like to be, or who we project to the rest of the world.

It is a significant metaphor of our age that the new confessional is the law office and the financial planning room and those who hear our confessions are estate planners, accountants, and financial advisors. They know our hopes, fears, our vanities. Unfortunately, they are not trained spiritually. They are only expert at understanding the complexity of mechanisms. They cannot help us reorient our priorities which is why there are so many awkward silences at these conferences. We are coming clean with who we are and what we are about… and they can only receive this but not do anything with it that would help us spiritually mature.

What does your spending say about you?................. That is what I hope you reflect on this season. I hope you develop a vision, a vision that you can articulate, of what you are about in this chapter of your life. I hope that vision has spiritual substance to it and realism. I hope you can stay focused on that vision as you begin to actualize it. I hope the way you spend your money and invest your money reflects that vision and lines up with who you are becoming.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonedes once said that most of humanity's deep suffering comes from our desiring things that are unnecessary spiritually. We come away not fulfilled, bored, cynical, contemptuous, and we see our life as a farce and we read these same debilitating affects into the lives of those around us.

I hope you become integrated, substantial, and you watch something important unfold before you. Stay focused on the big picture. And I hope that this community is an important part in your vision. I hope this place is part of that vision and that it is making you stronger spiritually. I hope it is grounding your family and helping them become more integrated. Oh, in case I forgot to mention it, we also need your cash. Amen.

[1] The idea for this sermon came from the title of a book by Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1991). As I read the book, I found the big central points important enough that I present them here. What follows are essentially Needleman's thoughts from the first half of the book. Specific passages will be cited, but the whole of the sermon is entirely indebted to his work. For the questions that he raises, it is eminently worth a read and it can be found at places like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble).

[i] This very insightful combination of texts comes from Needleman's book on p. 30-32 where he is making the point that the pursuit of money has become obsessive and compulsive in our society and we take that for granted. In Trump's book you can find the quote on p. 3.

[ii] Here ends the quote from The Art of the Deal.

[iii] This is from Trump: Surviving at the Top and can be found on pps. 5-6.

[iv] I got this idea entirely from Needleman and I have not had a chance to verify the legend of Solomon's throne independently yet. I am presuming that since Needleman teaches the Philosophy of Religion that he speaks of a tradition that is widely accepted. At any rate, it is a very fine description metaphorically, of the spiritual antinomies that we hold in dialectical tension in the spiritual quest. See the Chapter "Solomon the Wise" and pps. 94-95 in particular.