Concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, accompanied by corporate raider fever and hedge fund mentalities, can endanger the very independence and democratic decision-making we cherish.
My preference would aim at reducing hierarchies, rather than adding to them.
One of our earlier exercises began with pennies. Put them aside as “pennies from heaven” dedicated to helping others. Where do you choose to apply them? Can you get others to participate with you? How do you feel when you release the pennies to the project?
A young Friend once rose in Meeting for Worship to speak of ways his father viewed his work desk as a daily altar, a place of opportunities for holy service. Are there ways you, too, can transform your own work station into similar service, beyond what you are paid to do? Sometimes, the service may seem insignificant — except to that one person whose life was touched. Other times, it may be on a grand scale.
When news stories reported the death of James W. Rouse — a visionary developer who created the “new town” of Columbia, Maryland, and whose urban centerpieces such as Baltimore’s Harborplace and Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace revitalized major American downtowns – what came through was the scope of his vision. Rather than build structures, he wanted to enhance community. He learned to accept a personal pain when each effort inevitably fell short of his goal. After his death, one friend and Columbia neighbor, Padriac Kennedy, related,
“Jim Rouse liked to quote Daniel Burnham’s famous lines: ‘Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with every growing insistency.”
Kennedy then added: “Columbia is very proud of Jim Rouse. He was a creator of community, a champion of the poor, an uncommon man.”
Initially, we noticed that his surname was one of the old Maryland Quaker families and that he had been born in the vicinity of an old Quaker stronghold on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But more telling was this: he had, at one time, been involved with the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. He spent his retirement years working full-time to build affordable housing — an effort that led, in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood, to job-training, crime-prevention, and school and health-care improvements as well, as the New York Times noted in its obituary.

When other news stories reported on a devastating blaze that swept through a historic millyard in Methuen, Massachusetts, many observers expected the event would give company owners an excuse to close up shop and move operations overseas. Instead, everyone was startled when Malden Mills president Aaron Feuerstein announced his intentions of keeping everyone on the payroll until the factory was back on line. “That decision has to be grounded in religion,” I remember mumbling at the time. And then came Feuerstein’s explanation, a Yiddish saying from his father, one that translates roughly, “When the going gets rough, be a man!”
In subsequent interviews, Feuerstein confessed his surprise at being hailed as a hero for simply doing what he believed was right and for his loyalty to his workers and his community. One value leads to another.
One of the challenges facing contemporary American society is in creating opportunities for meaningful work for everyone, including youth who too often are excluded from activity that contributes to the common good. How much seemingly senseless violence today arises from a disconnection with a meaningful place in society and from an outlook that overvalues possession, especially status symbols, at the expense of integrity and mutuality?
As you stick to your Spending Plan, keep these perspectives in mind:
How much income would be “enough” or put you on “Easy Street”?
What would it really take for you to live on?
What would it take to endow yourself, as a trust or a foundation?
When you look at advertising, what do YOU see? What messages do you get? Do you unconsciously buy into them? Do you see them as Caesar’s, rather than God’s?
What are YOUR priorities and goals?
With practice, you will be empowered to live below your means — and live well, at that. The difference between your income and your expenses can be saved, invested, and even applied to projects you value. Your Money Operating System then becomes a microcosm of transforming the world.
American poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder has thought deeply about these issues, especially the place of meaningful work and labor:
“I asked myself a lot: what is the real work? I think it’s important, first of all, because it’s good to work — I love work, work and play are one. And that all of us will come back again to hoe in the ground, or gather wild potato bulbs with digging sticks, or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hive — we’re never going to get away from that. We’ve been living a dream that we’re going to get away from it, that we won’t have to do it. Put that out of our minds. . . . That work is always going to be there. It might be stapling papers, it might be typing in the office. But we’re never going to get away from that work, on one level or another. . . . And that’s the real work: to make the world as real as it is, and to find ourselves as real as we are within it.”
Remember, it’s #TalkingMoney.