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.
Why These 9
We often live in this strange dilemma of wanting to have simple explanations and knowing things are complex. Simplicity helps ease our travels in this world on one level and yet we don’t often get very far before encountering something that runs against our original simplicity. It can be super helpful to simply say “he’s a jerk!” and move on. Even though the most “jerky” people probably aren’t a jerk 100% of the time and they probably have people that love them dearly.
Money is no different than the “jerk” we used to date or currently work with. We can say it’s “the root of all evil” or “a necessary evil” but it sure is fun to have a bonus or some extra in our pockets. These types of dynamics are some of the most challenging to articulate and account for and that is why I have found what Paul wrote to be so compelling.
In order to grasp how these nine are so important and helpful in understanding our relationship to money, we must unpack the dynamic a bit. There is a singular nature of the nine. 1=9 and 9=1. Right there brains explode and we went deep real fast. This took me a long time to see but I think it is helpful.
Paul wrote the term fruit in the singular. He did not say fruits in the plural in reference to these nine things. Those that read the letters Paul wrote will quickly see that he is fond of lists. Historians will know that Paul is also not to be considered a religious quack but a true and respected philosophical giant of the first century that chose words carefully. The intention of this is to present a type of self-defining dynamic to express a greater reality of what is going on.
That may be philosophically complex so a couple examples are probably helpful. Most of us probably know someone that is very disciplined or self-controlled in some area of life - perhaps diet or excercize. We also probably have that friend that absolutely takes great joy in it. It’s fun to run 5 miles and is life giving. We also have that friend that seems absolutely miserable in their discipline. Something is not quite right with having self-control with no joy.
“Nice” people may be those that are kind and yet they may be missing goodness and love. A marriage that has faithfulness and self-control but no love, joy, peace is a type of relational hell or recipe for divorce. Each of these without the other eight presents a substandard or less than desirable version of the original. They each magnify each other and create a fullness that each word on their own cannot express.
In terms of the spirit of money, things are no different. How easy is it for someone that is anxious about money to have joy and be generous with what they have? Think about those that have all kinds of joy but no self-control with money. That doesn’t work out well either. We want to be “good” with money and from all my study and work with clients, that looks something like being smart and disciplined, living life, being generous, taking care of what’s most important, not worrying about the future … pretty soon you have basically said that you want to be love, joy, peace and so on.
The dynamic is both complete and fullness.
