Recently I’ve been thinking about money. It’s not just that interest rates are so high or that its inequitable distribution is so starkly highlighted by the NHS’s and the railway workers’ strikes. It’s not even about the wrenching experience of meeting the poor on the same street where Gucci and Chanel bags seem ubiquitous. What am I to do? What are my obligations in the face of these realities?
It’s a lot about money as an idea: what it means and what it represents: Possibility, power, control, opportunity, status, a weapon, a hug, a signal, atonement, entitlement. All of the above and more. Poet Wallace Stevens wisely calls it a metaphor.
Money is also emotional. In my growing up house my father made the money. My mother who – despite running a household of twelve children – didn’t “work” so she didn’t have any money that was her own. For fifty plus years I’ve been shaped by that memory. It fueled my near compulsion to have my own money (money as independence?) and another near compulsion to be secretive about “my” money (money as safety?).
There are lots of Biblical references to money: gold pieces, talents, riches, camels going through needles, give away and follow, even “the blessing of the Lord brings wealth” from Proverbs.
I’m not a WWJD kind of Christian, but I am a thinking and worrying (and feeling). Wondering, too, what others of you are thinking about these issues these days.
Annette Atkins
