Where your treasure is

Some inconclusive thoughts on Mammon, and a change in subscriptions.

I’ve been grappling with my beliefs about money. Partly because I have been meaning to change my model here for a while, introducing some paid-subscriber-only content, but have repeatedly put it off. I’m not quite sure why. The move makes sense. Earning a living as a writer and communicator is *hard*. This society does not value the fruits of creative labour (streaming all music ever made, for pennies, is now normal). In theory, I want to resist this. I believe we should pay writers just like we pay other people who provide things we want, that my work is worth as much as teaching or banking, engineering or gardening. But actually asking for money for it, here? There has been some kind of psychic block.

I don’t think it is devaluing myself, or not solely. More that money is such a knotty thing, tangled up with half-processed beliefs about what a good life is, what we owe each other, which so rarely get brought into the light. Having a salary, which I did for my whole working life before striking out to pursue this vocation, makes doing so largely avoidable.

Long term readers will know I am obsessed with relationship. The health of the threads of connection between us is what determines our flourishing, and money….complicates things.

I recently took part in a podcast series called “Tell Katelyn what to with her life” with Katelyn Beaty. I would recommend all of it (we also explored unwanted singleness and the longing for a child) but the money episode has really stayed with me. We explored why talking about our financial choices feels so awkward. Money is supremely private. Perhaps the only private thing left. Many of us (ok, perhaps many of us women) might talk about our sex lives with close friends, but I don’t know anyone who shares hard financial data.

So I thought as a collective spiritual practice, we could just tell each other how much we earn. Just pop it in the comments for me, would you? 

No? I thought not.

I’m not going to either, here, though we are trying to practice this radical transparency in our intentional community. I’m hoping this process will provide space to talk my way through some of the stickiness. It will also help my grapple with another reason money is on my mind: there is less of it to go around. Both generally, with the cost of food skyrocketing, and particularly, in our little household economy. Not in any disastrous way, just…noticeably. Part of the reason I know I need to wrestle with money is that writing that sentence gave me the ick. I am pretty comfortable with vulnerability, generally. I have found, in writing and in life, that the more honest I am about the messy reality of being a human, the more connection. However, naming personal financial constraint evokes a queasy mix of half processed emotions: fear that you will think I’m manipulating you, unearned ambient shame from a culture which links money to human value. Anxiety.

I know this tighter season will form me. I want to let it to drive me towards more freedom, not more hoarding, help me actually live my values rather than just giving lip service to them. I am trying to pay attention to the story I am telling about money and what that is doing to my soul. My tradition has a lot of teaching on this topic, more than on anything else, actually.

Christianity’s position is intensely counter cultural. When I was writing about Avarice for Fully Alive I was reminded just how stark its challenge is, and how regular:

The love of money is the root of all evil.

You cannot love both God and money.

It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kindgdom of God.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but… in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

One way of summarising this is: Money = soul danger. It is hard to read, honestly, as someone formed so strongly by a culture telling the precisely opposite story. Here, Money = safety. Yes, these and other verses have been read in different ways, nuanced, complexified, sometimes explained away¹, but I think the New Testament’s at least ambivalence towards money is hard to avoid. When I manage to make myself really look at it, the same question arises: without financial security, how do I keep myself safe?

Another, also vulnerable, podcast conversation about this helped me answer: I can’t. More than that, I don’t want to keep myself safe. My temptation to hoard and self-protect is a form of disconnection, a move away from fully aliveness. The deepest part of me believes (or wants to believe) that real safety is only to be found in Love divine, and in other people. In relationship, vertical and horizontal. We are meant to be each other’s safety.

I long to live in radical interdependence, open handed, participating full time in a gift economy. I see in the gospel narratives of the early church a ragtag community who met each other’s needs, gave thanks for their daily bread. Adam Wilson provides regular inspiration in that direction. David Benjamin Blower makes my heart ache with longing at this puckish promise:

It is the utopian province of the Messiah to announce that there is a life to be lived on the earth, apart from that world of debt, law and mastery… There is another economy: an ecology of…goodfaith: a web of creaturely relations, reciprocity, and direct unmediated life, shared together with all our relations. A life without Caesar's faced printed all over it.

I think money feels so sticky because I live between two stories. One one hand, the painfully, beautifully challenging call of my scriptures to Trust. On the other, the reality of mortgage payments, children to feed and a market economy which wants me to market myself. And, of course, the fact I like good sheets and fancy face cream. I’m 50% idealist, 50% pragmatist. The economic story of debt and credit, individual safety and money as power is so endemic it makes hypocrites of us all. I love this song by The Bengsons which sums up so much of my ridiculousness, a prayer/debate with God (listen to the whole thing if you can):

Could you put it in a less metaphysical way?
I got work to do
I got bills to pay
I guess Jesus wasn’t rich
But he seemed that way
He was born into royalty
Is all I’m gonna say

Living in community is helping me take baby steps towards inhabiting that richer, deeper money story. I also got bills to pay. There are friends on substack who embody the gift economy in radical ways and also charge for all their writing, and others who give it all away. Ultimately, until the time I’m called back into a salaried job, I need to make this collection of vocational activities sustainable. From next week, one post a month will be available to everyone, and one will be for paid subscribers only. If you’d value continuing to receive every post and the subscription cost is a barrier, just drop me a message saying so (no need to explain why) and I’ll happily gift you a paid subscription. As you can hear, I am very far from clarity, but this is where I have landed, for now.

I hope those of you who can will choose to upgrade, but I know there are a lot of substacks and you can’t support them all. In the economic story I am supposed to offer you a “value proposition”, tell you why upgrading will solve some problem or meet some need in you. That’s not for me to decide. I invite you to share some of the ways you wrestle with money and your values, vulnerable though this topic inevitably is (no figures required) in the comments, either way. Whether paid or not, I hope we can keep the thread of conversation, of relationship, and work our way towards a better story, together.

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Given that it plays such a central role in almost everyone’s life, there are surprisingly few poems about money. Here’s an excerpt from Money by Philip Larkin. You can read the whole poem here.

……

    Clearly money has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:

    You can’t put off being young until you retire,

And however you bank your screw, the money you save

    Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

    From long french windows at a provincial town,   

The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

    In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

1. https://classictheology.org/2021/10/12/through-the-eye-of-an-actual-needle-the-fake-gate-theory/