A Pastoral Letter To The Rich

1. As any broker will tell you, there is a difference between price and value. That which costs a lot might not have a lot of value. And conversely what has value might not cost much. When price and value are considered synonymous we stray into the error of assuming that porsches are more important than primary teachers or wars than peace.

2. I’m a spiritual broker, and frankly wealth stuffs up the arteries of the spiritual heart. A moderate amount tastes good. The trick is to learn to curb our appetite before it acquires a prominence in our lives that leads to spiritual death. Today such appetite is extolled as the driver to success. The monks of old called it greed.

3. It is no blessing being poor. Those who think otherwise have never been there. Poverty by means of the cocktail of anxiety, violence, and depression can also destroy the spiritual heart. Escaping poverty involves more than having money, though money helps. Critical to escaping is having a friend who believes in you.

4. Don’t believe the hype that says you earned your wealth. Give credit where it’s due. What your parents, schooling, race, gender and culture gave and give you is very significant in predisposing you to financial success. Luck is not insignificant either. Hard work does not excuse a lack of humility.

5. Don’t believe the hype that equates wealth with wisdom. At the nub of wisdom is the ability to be happy irrespective of success, wealth, and relationships. Too many people make their happiness conditional upon their assets.

6. Ask most dying eighty-year-olds what they wished had had more of and they will say ‘time with loved ones’. That’s the hope of rich and poor alike. Money and success usually won’t buy you time; it will buy you more money and success. Poverty doesn’t buy you time either, it just brings misery. To get time you need to trade in the money, success and misery.

7. Time is a spiritual concept. The Greeks helpfully distinguished between “chronos’’ chronological time and “kairos’’ the right moment. We need to create right moments. Or, as is more often the case, be spiritually tuned so that we are receptive when the right moment comes along. Those who aren’t tuned will miss or stall.

8. You can trade in your money to buy chronos time. You can get a little beach place, bury your blackberry, and take long barefooted walks. You can keep this going for a quite a while catching up on family, novels, and sleep. But eventually the novelty will wear off and you’ll be hankering to get back to work. For meaning hinges on work. Next thing you know you are in the suit, in the car, on the cell phone, in a rush. You missed because you weren’t spiritually tuned.

9. Such tuning is not easy. There is pain involved. The Greeks had a word for this too: ‘kenosis’ self-emptying. In the search for meaning we need to re-order our lives, removing things we have become addicted to and trying to live without them. It isn’t a case of having a ‘balanced life’. Some things are just plain bad.

10. A heart thrives on and generates love. It pumps the oxygen of kindness, tolerance, and compassion through the body and the body politik. As the song says we are made for love. Yet, as the songs also say, we continually screw up, making choices that destroy friendships and the fidelity love needs. Work, instead of being the expression of love, becomes the expression of our need for success. We have got those big three – love, work, and success - out of sync. Dangerously so.

11. Most businesses talk about work and success. They don’t usually talk about love. They don’t talk about it because they haven’t figured out how it is related to work and success. They’ve been duped that love is a private thing, a home thing, something that happens after hours. They haven’t configured in this key motivational ingredient and spiritual necessity in human happiness.

12. “To whom much is given much will be demanded.’’ It’s an old phrase and not helpful when used to induce guilt. But it is a reminder to those of us who are considered rich to use what we have in knowledge, wealth, and wisdom to make the whole world a better place. We affect each other on this planet. We can’t afford to only look after those who are close to us, because the impact of those who aren’t can irrevocably destroy the future.

We’re in this together,
Glynn