Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (53 page)

• It is grown by someone who cares deeply about its nourishing and aesthetic qualities.
  
• It is grown in a way that enriches the ecosystem, soil, water, and life in general.
  
• Its production and processing contribute to a healthy society.
  

In other words, sacred food is ensconced in a web of natural and social relationships. It is grown with a love for people and earth that is not an abstract love but a love for
this
land and
these
people. We cannot love anonymously, which is perhaps why I’ve always gotten a somewhat cold feeling from anonymous charity that doesn’t create connection. Somebody grew sacred food for
me!

When we see our work as sacred, we seek to do it well for its own sake rather than “good enough” for something external such as the market, the building code, or a grade. A builder who does sacred work will employ materials and methods that might be hidden in the walls, beyond anyone’s notice, for centuries. He derives no rational benefit from this, just the satisfaction of doing it right. So also the business owner who pays an above-market living wage or the manufacturer who far exceeds environmental standards. They have no rational expectation of benefit, yet somehow they
do
benefit, sometimes in ways that are completely unexpected. Unexpected returns accord perfectly with the nature of the Gift: as Lewis Hyde puts it, a gift “disappears around the corner,” “into the mystery,” and we don’t know how it will travel back to us.

Another way to see the unexpected fruits that arise from the mystery is that when we live in the spirit of the gift, magic happens. Gift mentality is a kind of faith, a kind of surrender—and that is a prerequisite for miracles to arise. From the Gift, we become capable of the impossible.

I met a man in Oregon who owns a property management company specializing in low-income elder care facilities. “This,” he says, “is an impossible business.” Subject to the multiple, conflicting stressors of medical institutions, insurance companies, government regulation, the poverty of the residents, and general financial turmoil, his industry was in a state of crisis. The week I visited him, two of his largest competitors called begging him to take over their money-losing facilities. Yet somehow, this man has built a profitable, growing business, an empowering workplace, and human living environments that are a model for the industry. How does he do it? “Every day,” he says, “I walk into the office to face a stack of impossible problems. I cannot imagine any way to solve them. So I do the only thing I can do: I bow into service. And then, like magic, solutions fall into my lap.”

The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create. Whether it is a material, human, or social creation, we put ourselves into the humble service of something preexisting yet unmanifest. Thus it is that the artist is in awe of his or her own creation. I get that feeling when I read aloud from
The Ascent of Humanity:
“I could not have written this.” That book is its own entity, born through me but no more my creation than parents create a baby, or a farmer a spinach plant. They transmit the impulse of life, they provide a place for it to grow, but they do
not and need not understand the details of cell differentiation. I too nourished my growing book with every resource available to me, and birthed it with terrific hardship from its womb in my mind into physical form, and I am intimately familiar with its every nuance, yet I have an abiding sense that it existed already, that it is beyond my contrivance. Can a parent legitimately take credit for the accomplishments of his or her child? No. That is a form of theft. Nor will I take credit for the beauty of my creations. I am at their service.

I have drawn this out to show that the same logic that the Christian fathers, Thomas Paine, and Henry George applied to land applies as well to the fruits of human labor. They exist beyond ourselves—we are stewards at their service, just as we are properly stewards of the land and not its owners. As they are given to us, so we give them onward. That is why we are drawn to do business in the spirit of the Gift. It feels good and right because it aligns us with the truth. It opens us to a flow of wealth beyond the limits of our design. Such is the origin of any great idea or invention: “It came to me.” How then can we presume to own it? We can only give it away, and thereby keep the channel open through which we will continue to receive sacred gifts, in diverse forms, from other people and all that is.

As an incentive to make the switch to a gift model of business, observe that for many of the sacred professions, the old model isn’t working anymore. Here in the small city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is not exactly the most progressive place on earth, there are nonetheless literally hundreds of holistic, complementary, and alternative practitioners advertising in the local Holistic Health Networker. Hundreds. And probably at least half of them, upon entering their herbal studies program or yoga therapy program or naturopathy program, or their hypnotherapy, angelic healing,
crystal healing, polarity therapy, Reiki, cranial-sacral therapy, holistic nutrition, massage therapy, or other program, had in mind a future career in an office or holistic health center seeing “clients” for “sessions” at $85 or $120 each. It is impossible that more than a handful will realize that dream. Yet the schools and training programs keep churning out new practitioners. Sooner or later, most of them will have to abandon the clients-and-sessions model and turn toward offering their skills as a gift.
⁶

What is happening in these professions is starting to happen more generally. We might ascribe it to overcapacity, debt overhang, the “falling marginal return on investment,” or some other economic factor, but the fact is that the old profit model is in crisis. Like the holistic practitioners I described, collectively we will soon have no choice but to adopt a different model en masse.

In the old economy, people pursued jobs and careers for the purpose of making a living. From the viewpoint of survival, nothing is too sacred to sell, to charge money for. If you are working for the sake of survival, such as in a lead mine in China, then it probably won’t feel wrong to negotiate and demand the best price possible for your labor. Another way to look at it is that the survival of oneself and loved ones is itself a sacred endeavor.

I want to inject a note of gentleness and realism into this discussion. Please do not think I am advocating some saintly standard of altruism or self-sacrifice. You do not gain heavenly rewards for accepting a salary cut. If your main concern right now is survival or security, “work” to you will probably not be an avenue for the expression of your gifts. Your job will feel like just that, a “job”—something
you do primarily for the money and would quit or radically change if you had no financial pressure. And even though you may feel some sense of being ripped off, of living the life someone is paying you to live but not your own life, the life of a slave compelled to work or to die, that doesn’t mean you “should” overcome your fears and quit that job and trust you’ll be OK. Living in the gift is not another thing you are supposed to do in order to be a good person. Fear is not the new enemy in our continuing war against the self, the successor to the old hobgoblins of sin and ego. Sacred economics is part of a broader revolution in human beingness: internally, it is the end of the war against the self; externally, it is the end of the war against nature. It is the economic dimension of a new age, the Age of Reunion.

So, if you find yourself slaving away at a job, working for the money, doing it “good enough” rather than “as beautifully as I am able,” I urge you to transition out of that job
when and only when you are ready
. Perhaps for now you will see your job as a gift to yourself, giving you a sense of security for as long as it takes for that feeling to become second nature. Fear is not the enemy, despite what so many spiritual teachers say. “The opposite of love,” says one. “Frozen joy,” says another. Actually fear is a guardian, holding us in a safe space in which to grow; you could even say that fear is a gift. Eventually, as we grow, the fears that were once protective become limiting, and we desire to be born. That this will happen is inevitable. Trust yourself now, and you will continue to trust yourself when your desire moves you to transcend the old fears and enter a larger, brighter realm. When the moment of birth comes, you won’t be able to stop yourself.

Ending the struggle to be good also means that giving does not involve a feeling of sacrifice or self-abnegation. We give because
we want to, not because we should. Gratitude, the recognition that one has received and the desire to give in turn, is our innate default state. How could it not be, when life, breath, and world are gifts? When even the fruit of our own labors is beyond our contrivance? To live in the gift is to reunite with our true nature.

As you step into a gift mentality, let your feelings guide you. Let your giving arise from gratitude and not the desire to measure up to some standard of virtue. Perhaps the first steps will be small ones: adding little extras, doing small favors with no agenda of reward. Perhaps if you run a business, you will convert a small part of it to a gift model. Whatever steps you take, know that you are preparing for the economy of the future.

Earlier in this book I described the disconnection and loneliness of a society in which nearly all social capital, nearly all relationships, have been converted to paid services; in which distant strangers meet nearly all of our material needs; in which we can always “pay someone else to do it”; in which the unspoken knowledge
I don’t need you
pervades our social gatherings, rendering them vacuous and dispensable. Such is the pinnacle of civilization, the end point of centuries of increasing affluence: lonely people in boxes, living in a world of strangers, dependent on money, enslaved to debt—and incinerating the planet’s natural and social capital to stay that way. We have no community because community is woven from gifts. How can we create community when we pay for all we need?

Community is not some add-on to our other needs, not a separate ingredient for happiness along with food, shelter, music, touch, intellectual stimulation, and other forms of physical and spiritual nourishment. Community arises from the meeting of these needs. There is no community possible among a group of people who
do not need each other. Therefore, any life that seeks to be independent of other people for the meeting of one’s needs is a life without community.

The gifts that weave community cannot be mere superficialities; they must meet real needs. Only then do they inspire gratitude and create the obligations that bind people together. The difficulty in creating community today is that when people meet all their needs with money, there is nothing left to give. If you give someone a product that is for sale somewhere, either you are giving them money (by saving them the expense of buying it themselves) or you are giving them something they don’t need (else they would have already bought it). Neither is sufficient to create community unless, in the first instance, the recipient actually needs money. Thus it is that poor people develop much stronger communities than rich people do. They have more unmet needs. This has been one of the greatest teachings of my period of poverty that followed the publication of
The Ascent of Humanity
. Out of necessity, I learned to receive without fear of stepping into obligation. The aid I received reawakened in me the primal gratitude of infancy, the realization that I am utterly dependent for my survival and existence on the web of giving that surrounds me. It empowered me to be more generous, too, having experienced and survived the ignominy of bankruptcy, of losing my apartment and sleeping with my children in other people’s living rooms, and learning that it is OK to receive such help. Perhaps one benefit of the hard economic times that are encroaching upon our illusion of normalcy is that they will reawaken in more and more people this primal gratitude, borne of the necessity of receiving gifts in the absence of payment. As in infancy, periods of helplessness reconnect us to the principle of the gift. Other people I know have had similar realizations when severe illness rendered them helpless.