The matter of currency is central to human life; and it's important to grasp that it's not synonymous with money. Money is a variety of currency, but currency is a lot more than merely money. And indeed, money is a rather debased form of currency. As Jesus said, "You cannot serve God and Mammon." Of course there's more to Mammon than simply the love of money, Mammon is the slime mould of cynicism that grows into as much of our life as we give it permission so to do. It's a temptation and a tendency, and we have to be watchful.
Currency is flow and exchange, much like blood within a human body, facilitating, nourishing, enabling.
I think of life as sustained and carried by the flow of grace, which is the will of God in the world, the direction of God's purpose. When we are aligned with that, then what we offer and contribute swells the tide of goodness. So it's a kind of river that bears us up. A current of life. Currency. And money can be part of that, if we let it be; it all depends how we direct it.
The crucial thing is that it should be allowed to flow. Hoarding and stagnation produce toxicity, necrosis. If you dam up currency you're asking for trouble.
In medieval England, a conduit would be created to direct the flow of water from a spring in the hills down to a building on the hillside. They'd have picked a spring that would keep going of course, not one that dried up in the summer, but even so the flow of water would be more plentiful after rainfall. And a household wouldn't want water pouring through at all times, but they would want it available at all times — much like us with money. In consequence they created cisterns to capture the flowing water and establish a reservoir, so it was there when they wanted it. That's in effect what we're doing with our bank accounts. They establish a reservoir, but the crucial thing is the flow. Capital is helpful, but income is the main thing.
So we give thought to how we might generate income, and we establish a reservoir to assist in ensuring the flow of income is reliable at all seasons.
And we also consider the different kinds of currency and how to facilitate its flow in our lives. Goodwill is a form of currency, and so is grace; it's important to establish the flow of all three in our lives — money, goodwill and grace. Goodwill could be seen as earned grace, the positive regard of our neighbours on account of how we have treated them. Grace, conversely, is unearned goodwill. It's like those two characters in Charles Kingsley's book The Water Babies, Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By (grace) and Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did (goodwill).
It's also the case that our Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills and he is the God of mountainous provision (El Shaddai).
The art of living is to trust in God's amazing grace, to entrust ourselves to the flow of that stream and align ourselves with its direction. To receive its blessing we open our hands to its streaming — trying to grab it for ourselves is useless, because in closing our fist to secure it, we find we have lost it all. The way of blessing requires that we open our hands, in giving as well as in receiving. Blessing is currency — the currency, of which money and land and fecundity and goodwill and grace are all part.
To live in this way releases us from anxiety and timidity, dissolves the fear of scarcity, blooms into hope and confidence.
When it comes to provision, then, the way to follow is to make of our lives a conduit from the spring that never fails, setting up a cistern en route so we establish a reservoir that will even out cyclical variations, and to see to it that goodwill, grace and money are blended together, flowing our with generosity and flowing in with thanksgiving and trust.
I know it all sounds a bit woo-woo, but I'm sixty-eight now and so far it's never let me down.
One pitfall to avoid is any kind of debt, because debt is antagonistic to freedom and flexibility, and successful living requires both. "Owe to no man anything except the debt of love" [Rom.13.8 KJV]
Simplicity, wanting little, is wealth. Currency — the flow of grace, goodwill and money — promotes wellbeing. Stagnation and hoarding undermine health.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is thy faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.” [Lamentations 3.22-24 RSV]
In thinking about money and worldly goods, I've found a shift in perspective away from "mine" to "ours" very helpful. I owe this insight to the Poor Clare nuns, who observe a discipline of calling everything "ours" and nothing "mine". So a Poor Clare nun wears "our clogs" and "our habit", nothing is her own, she's just using something that belongs to us all.
This is another way of looking at the concept of that spring in the Middle Ages, directed down the hill by a conduit that includes a reservoir to keep the flow even. The reservoir in this case is the stock of items currently in your possession. So at the moment you may have our jeans or our stick blender or our freezer or our winter coat or our comfy chair. But it belongs to God and to all of us.
The cheerful thing about this is it eliminates any hesitancy in passing it on. If someone else needs a winter coat and frankly you're too fat for yours now, you don't lie awake agonising in shame that you spent all that money on a good coat and it hasn't worked out — you just add it back into the flow (through Freegle or the local give-and-takery page on Facebook, or eBay or the charity shop or your sister or a friend). Don't mothball it, don't worry about it, just give it away because it was always God's and ours anyway, not just yours.
I should say in passing that I am not advocating communism, which is a depressing philosophy under which nothing is God's, nothing is ours, it's certainly not yours, it all belongs to the state, and you'll be allocated what you can and can't have according to a list kept by a bureaucrat inside a building who doesn't care about you at all. The allocations of the state are one-size-fits-none, and its bureaucrats farm you like ants farm greenfly. You are better off with God, who made you and knows you, who loves you and watches over you, who has the power to heal and transform you and fit you with hope and peace — which is more that can be said for any political régime since the dawn of time.
So live like a Poor Clare but not like Joseph Stalin, let the flow of grace nourish your life like a stream flowing down off the moor into the small but adequate stone cistern you have made to catch its provision. Let goodness flow into you and let it flow on from you to nourish the lives of others, generating cheerfulness and gratitude and the joy of giving. Let your currency be a blended flow of grace, goodwill and money, and live under God, in peace and trust.
There's a song about this.
And as another monastic friend (Fr Tom Cullinan) remarked to me, "It helps to want what other people don't."
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