The Love of Money

         “Money is the root of all evil,” he said, “it’s in the Bible.” I didn’t respond. People don’t like being corrected. Sometimes it’s best just to smile and move on.  
          Actually, I thought to myself, the line is “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil…” (1 Timothy 1:6) It may seem like a small difference, but it matters.  
          Money isn’t the problem – it’s our rapacious craving born from the consciousness of scarcity that causes all of the destruction. “People who want to get rich,” Paul writes, “fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction… Some people, eager for money, have wandered…and pierced themselves with many griefs.”  
          What Paul’s lamenting is not money, but the spiritual poverty that goads us into the mistaken belief that our happiness lies in the meaningless acquisition of things. To fall into the love of money is to be pierced with many griefs. We must instead love the work, without attachment to the results.
           Some voices in traditional Christianity have used these passages to support a dualistic philosophy that denigrates the material world as a treacherous lair of temptation, a trap our godly souls must strive to avoid. This arguably Medieval, life-denying, and otherworldly form of Christianity views the world of embodied forms as a fallen realm to be transcended. But that isn’t the only way to see it.
          Other voices within the Christian family align more closely with their sister faiths Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in their affirmation of the fundamental goodness of the material world.
          In Hinduism, ultimate reality is known as Brahman, the sacred formless ground of being out of which all forms emerge and to which all forms return. In this non-dualistic view, the world of forms is a sacred reflection of divinity, a realm of infinite value and beauty. Even the creativity and productivity pouring through us is understood as yet another aspect of the one divine unfolding. Our longing to expand, whether spiritually, professionally, or materially, is not a sign of vice or self-obsession – it is simply Brahman giving birth to itself through us. Wanting a more beautiful home isn’t always covetousness – sometimes it’s just growth. Who are we not to create more, have more, and be more – not in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement, but in the spirit of playful enjoyment?
          You’ve also heard it said that money can’t buy happiness. You know who talks like that? People who have money. It’s difficult to be happy if you have no shelter, you don’t feel safe, or you have no access to adequate healthcare. Poverty exerts terrible stress on the poor, akin to the traumatic stress experienced by combat veterans. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or worrying about whether or not the thin walls of your section 8 apartment can keep out stray bullets from drive by shootings make happiness a distant dream.
          A raft of recent studies show that money does indeed buy happiness, up to a point. Happiness increases as income increases, up to about $75,000 a year. As income rises above $75,000, the happiness correlation drops off. And by the time you get to $250,000 a year, the correlation disappears. If you’re well into the six figures, money cannot buy more happiness. But below that it can, and it does.
          If all is one, then our participation in the material world is a sacred experience. Doing the work we have been given to do, applying our God-given talents, sensibilities, and initiative to create products, services, and solutions for the needs of the world is everyone’s sacred purpose. When we offer up our best in the consciousness of service, people give us money for it. As we work in our given professions for a world that works for everyone, we honor ourselves, our creator, and each other. Earning money for honest work is a deeply satisfying, honorable pleasure. Using that money to provide for one’s family, enrich one’s experiences, enhance one’s safety, security, and enjoyment, cannot be evil. 

[This piece was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the July/August 2017 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Mark of Paul

[A version of this article under the title "Sinners and Saints" first appeared in the September/October 2012 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The centerpiece of the Christian narrative is the concept of human nature.  Are we inherently flawed and in need of outside assistance or imminently sacred and inherently unified with the divine?  How the apostle Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teachings shaped the Christian view of sin.

The Early Years

Although they were contemporaries, Jesus and the apostle Paul never met.  They never walked together down a dusty road, sharing figs and dried fish as they talked.  Paul, the Pharisaic Jew, never had the privilege of sitting in the shade of an olive tree and listening to the teacher share his fresh take on the Kingdom of God, a vision unmoored from the teachings of the Temple and rooted deep within his own experience.  Paul never felt the loving gaze of his teacher’s eyes, or the touch of his hand, or the way his wordless presence awakened others to their own divinity. 

If Jesus and Paul had met, things might have turned out differently.

Instead, in the heady years that followed the state execution of Jesus, long before the first word of the New Testament was written, Paul did his best to cobble together a set of doctrines and practices from the scattered recollections of Jesus’ students and his own insights. 

Paul became a follower of the nascent Jesus movement, known simply in those early years as “the way.”  It is Paul’s understanding, some say misunderstanding, of Jesus and his teachings that shaped Christianity more than any other source.  Paul pulled the movement together by writing letters to fledgling groups scattered around the Mediterranean in places like Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus and Rome – letters that set the tone for everything that was to follow.  Four hundred years later those letters were canonized by the bishops of the Church and became the inerrant word of God.  It is impossible to overestimate Paul’s importance in the formation of Christianity.  Almost half of the New Testament was written by Paul.

The Nature of Sin

Jesus spoke a regional dialect of Aramaic.  For him, the word sin would have been hob or hobha, a term borrowed from a commercial context meaning “debt.”  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, hob or hobha became hamaratia, meaning “internal flaw.”  For centuries, ancient Greek tragedians had employed hamaratia as the driving force of their plays, the plot element that brought down the protagonist in a paroxysm of pride and obstinacy.  For the Greeks, the most common internal flaw was hubris, a destructive, self-obsessed arrogance. 

As soon as they were written down, the teachings of Jesus were altered by the unavoidable distortions of translation.

            When the Bible was rendered into English, hamaratia became sin, derived from the old English word synn, an archery term meaning “to miss the mark” – yet another layer of meaning.

            So what is sin?  Is it a temporary debt we can repay?  Is it a permanent stain no self-effort can alleviate?  It is a deeply rooted psychological flaw that will inevitably spell our doom?  Is it a simple mistake, quickly corrected when we release another arrow from our bow?

            And how do we repair the damage?

            How do we climb out of the hole and get back on level ground where we are no worse than anyone else, and no better than anyone else?  How do we restore our original status as beings of infinite value?  How do we lay bare the lie of our unworthiness and in the light of forgiveness walk across the bridge that spans the chasm of our alienation?

War and Peace

Paul and Jesus characterized our relationship with sin quite differently.  In Paul’s dualism, the material world and the spiritual world are locked in an eternal battle.  In The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell writes, “For Paul, the moral life is difficult, muscular and perilous.”  In Paul’s often violent portrait of the human predicament, we must cultivate the vigilance of warriors and gird our loins against the weakness of the flesh.  Declaring that “nothing good lives in me,” Paul seems to loath his own humanness and pines for the triumph of his spiritual nature, a transcendent force that comes from above.  The cancer within is “our sinful nature,” a power so great that we cannot overcome it with our will, yet struggle against it we must.

            In his letter to the Romans (7:21), Paul writes, “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my own members.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  Two thousand years of traditional Christian dogma take birth in this single passage – the claim that this world, including our own bodies, is hopelessly mired in sin, that sin is a condition, not an event, and that we’ll really only be free when we’re dead.

            Jesus paints a startlingly different portrait of sin and the means of our release from its grasp.  Instead of battling against an adversary we can never conquer, Jesus asks us to abandon the entire paradigm of life as a struggle and move instead into a condition of consciousness characterized by surrender and ease.  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” he says in Matthew 11:28.  “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

            The Sanskrit word yoga is etymologically linked to the English word “yoke”, and it is no accident that Jesus employs this potent agricultural metaphor to describe a deep psychological state.  In the same way a yoke channels the vast and undirected energy of oxen toward a specific aim, the disciplines of yoga seek to channel the vast and undirected energy of consciousness toward a specific aim, a fruitful harvest of awakening.  We’re always yoked to something, whether we’re aware of it or not, because our thoughts bind us to words and actions.  When we are bound, or yoked, to selfish, destructive thoughts, we are led down a path of suffering.  When we choose instead to follow our higher nature, our Christ-consciousness, we feel the struggle slipping away, replaced with serenity and divine alignment.  Conflict is replaced with cooperation, agitation with contentment. 

Mitchell puts it this way: “For Jesus, there is no drama.  The more we surrender, the more we are carried along in the current of God’s love.  Not that good and evil don’t exist, but when you see into the realm beyond good and evil, where everything is pure grace, we are much less likely to be caught up in our own judgments and moral categories, and much more ready to experience every action as easy and natural.”

           

Know Peace, No War

By emphasizing the dualism of good and evil and our own inherently sinful nature, traditional Christianity bears the mark of Paul.  But what if Paul got it wrong?  What if the early church’s reliance on Paul set Christianity off on the wrong foot? 

What if Jesus and Paul had met and become friends?  Perhaps Paul’s strident self-loathing would have softened in the loving gaze and unconditional acceptance of the master teacher.  Maybe he would have seen himself differently and written some very different letters.