The Spirit of Money

Spirit is an interesting phenomenon. It’s this thing that can feel very real and yet isn’t always easy to describe. Some may want to make everything spirit while others avoid that type of terminology at all costs. Old religious and wisdom literature used the term pneuma or air to describe this thing that we know is there and yet can’t articulate very well.

How else would one try to describe something you feel but may not see? 

Air seems like a pretty good starting place but let us try to go further and describe the ‘feel’ of spirit. We are prone to use it in relationship between people like “they’ve got a good spirit about them” or to describe a particular energy (another pneuma-like term). Sometimes we may speak of spirit regarding a place. “There’s a bad spirit at that place” like a vibe, atmosphere or the like. No matter what your feeling about the particular use of the word spirit, you know what I mean by it’s use of the feeling we have between people and places. 

I have spent much of the past decade or more looking for a framework that can capture and define spirit in way that presents a clearer dynamic of what we are actually talking about and what we are expecting a “good” vibe to be and produce. What I have found comes from something written in the first century and I believe it to be the best framework and dynamic I have come across. 

There is a famous and under-appreciated philosophy in the Bible that holds the key. In a letter to the Galatians the author, Paul, mentions what is translated as the fruit of spirit being love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. Before dismissing this because you know what it says and understand it or because you have predisposition to dismiss things in the Bible - I invite you to encounter it’s human wisdom outside of any faith tradition or belief system. 

I ask anyone to look at those nine terms and decide which ones you don’t want to be said of about you. Just think of their opposite and my guess is we have all had a boss or co-worker or person in our life that was cold, anxious, harsh, or more! Have you ever said “I hope my boss is angry, anxious, impatient, unkind and maybe has no self-control?”  No way! It’s obvious! We do not want that type of vibe around us. My hope is that at this point we can at least admit there is some type of ‘human truth’ to the idea that these nine words are at least relationally desirable. 

So what does all that have to do with the title of this essay “The spirit of money?” I’m glad you asked. 

I have wondered if this dynamic of nine applies to non-human relationships with things of the level of something like a natural law. Order and flourishing on one hand versus chaos and disarray on the other. What I have come believe is that the spirit dynamic Paul so plainly and simply wrote certainly does apply to our non-human relationships and may best help us in them, especially with money. 

Most Americans list money as their number one anxiety. This is certainly not helpful in knowing how to relate to money and what to do. Disordered spirit creates disordered relationships  and use of things, like money or worse, people. Money is meant to create peace and yet it doesn’t. I believe we can all intuit that it isn’t an actual $20 bill in our hand that causes anxiety, just like it isn’t the flesh and bones of a human being that causes discord. 

For some, that may be the case where a severe trauma with a particular person or thing has occurred, but we know it is the relationship of before influencing the current state. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are highly attuned to the potential and possible, opportunity or shortcomings and other unseen but very present and felt dynamics or people and things - Pneuma!

This is the first aspect of the spirit of money, that there is an emotional relationship to it beyond the math and economic aspect. It is far more alive than basic utility for it is part of the natural order of things. Money has spirit and that spirit is to be positive and productive. It is to create and afford love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. I believe deep down inside of you and me, we both know that to be more true than believing money’s purpose to be the opposite.