Have y’all seen the website Bolder Giving? It’s all about people who give away lots of money – like, way more of their money than is normally sanctioned by capitalist society. It’s not very explicitly political, but a lot of the profiles are really amazing and radical. Anyway, I participated in a conference call they hosted the other day because I thought it would be interesting to report back for Enough. It was a conversation with Tom Hsieh, a high earning executive who decided with his partner to live at or below the national median household income and give the rest of their family’s income away, which they’ve been doing for years.
There are lots of interesting questions bound up in this story (how do we make decisions about what is “enough”, etc), but one of the things that stuck with me from the call was a moment when we were talking about spirituality. Tom and his partner are religious, and their choice to give away such a large percentage of their income is connected to their faith and their belief in god. Tom talked about his experience of feeling provided for by god even while making the choice to sacrifice a lot of the things that people often think they need to be secure.
Faith and spirituality are such a crucial part of these conversations for me, not because I believe in god but because I think that any questions about how to live in a just way in such an unjust world are fundamentally spiritual, because they have to do with our beliefs about humanity and what we think is possible and things like justice and hope and goodness. During the call, I was completely identifying with Tom in terms of how faith affects my choices about money and giving, even though our belief systems are probably really different.
When I decided to give away most of the money I inherited, a lot of people around me (family etc) were flipping out because it wasn’t a “responsible” decision and they were really worried about me being safe and secure. I was very unworried, because class privilege and rich family give me a huge safety net (same way that Tom’s high-paying job gives him a huge safety net), no matter what I do with the money I have access to now.
But the other reason why it wasn’t a hard decision to give away that money was because I gave it to support things I believe in so much. I believe in deep, systemic, transformative change. I believe in a world without prisons. I believe in ending violence without relying on systems of policing and incarceration. I believe in a world in which everyone has access to housing, healthy food, ancestral wisdom, safety, community, and human dignity. I believe in those things even though they’re big and intangible and hard to quantify, and even though giving some money to organizations that are working towards that world is (as my dad often reminds me) a small act in terms of measurable impact. I don’t think about giving away money in terms of impact – I just think about it in terms of doing the right thing, the thing that is the most true to my deeply held beliefs.
And I would rather put my faith in that vision – of a world based on liberation, where people share resources freely and everyone has what they need – than put my faith in the much more tangible security of things like a big retirement fund and lots of insurance, even though the latter things are tangible and – for me – fairly easily attainable. On a spiritual level, I don’t think those things provide real security. (Not to say that material security isn’t important and necessary – just that it isn’t necessary at the extreme level that capitalism teaches us to strive for.) I think real security comes from things like community, caretaking, love, and recognizing our interconnectedness with other people. Acting according to those values makes me feel provided for and safe and connected, in a way that felt similar to what Tom was saying about feeling provided for and connected to god.
I’m remembering this old thread on Dean’s livejournal in which many people have brilliant and thought-provoking things to say on this topic. Dean writes:
capitalism is based on or produces a notion that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and individual, that it isn’t safe to share because you won’t be taken care of, that private property is innate and natural. i believe that people are fundamentally connected, well-intentioned, generous and caring. i have no solid singular proof of this, it’s too general to prove, it’s a matter of faith. i also believe that capitalism is unsustainable and change will occur, and that change can be less violent and more beneficial if we do key work now to set up community resources, political education, to redistribute wealth and power in ways that allow for new political leadership, etc.
I want to pick this conversation back up – I’m curious about ways that your faith and spirituality and religious traditions are connected to how you think about the work you do for justice and liberation, and the choices you make about money and giving.
Wild. The Winter Solstice is tomorrow and an activist/artist/community facilitator/healer is hosting a gathering.. I’ve never really known much or given the Winter Solstice much thought until now. Ritual – Share an offering. Yes, I am into this. A percussion duo play exotic instruments at sunrise, this time every year at Links Hall. I have never gone. This year, I really want to go. And more than that, I’ve been craving spiritual connection very much actually.
Alot of positive, integrated, wholistic, social justice healing is swarming around me these days which is amazing because it’s so close I can practically taste it. Since being diagnosed with mastocytic colitis (mild inflammation of colon), I’ve been eating more raw and focusing on my colon health which includes yoga, but OH if i could only make a weekly ritual. Why is that so difficult? For myself, it is hard to keep to routine. To take my fish oil every morning and to go to yoga or find a quiet space to meditate. I want this regularity but then I despise and reject it, claiming flexibility and spontaneity as my defense.
I am joining a Be Present support group with some artists and activists. Alot of processing and taking care of people’s needs and desires is involved. Fear and intimacy are all so connected to spirit. A burgeoning Be Present community is forming in Chicago. So much spirit and healing is really front and center. Many organizers are quitting their NPIC jobs because its abusive and scarring of the spirit. Harishi went back to India to meditate in solitude, address hard conversations with his family while going to an outlying warring village as an ally, possibly potentially dangerous if they find out he is American. He comes back in time to join Chicago USSF organizing and share his peaceful mind and insights with us. Lots of self-care services to raise money for grassroots groups. The more integrated, the more spirit-filled, including the VENUS art and resistance event last night. Social justice holds it close and dear.
I do get nostalgic this time of year for choral music, for requiems and large theatrical cacophonies. I grew up Episcopalian. This is about all I love of the church and would prefer Meredith Monk even gregorian chant, more divorced from christian texts. Universal. Omnipresent. But I still find myself listening to the classical station and digging out old choral albums to play on the turntable. We used to go to midnight service to support my dad, enjoy the theatrics, sing along with the horns. Perhaps this year. It might be good to visit old memories.
Tyrone, thanks so much for writing this! As someone who is spiritual but not religious, I related a lot to your blog.
You and your readers might enjoy continuing the conversation with Tom online at this link:
http://boldergiving.org/site/index.php/2009/11/19/featured-giver-tom-hsieh/#comments
I’m going to put the link to your blog there, too, and send it to Tom. Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts. I hope more Resource Generation folks participate in future calls.
Warmly,
Anne
Thank you for writing this – for me, spirituality involves action based on my spiritual beliefs. The connections you drew between your own spiritual beliefs and how you live/work/what you do with your finances is inspiring and illuminating. Your experiences and thoughts remind me the importance of taking action. My beliefs may do me good, but what good am I doing in the world and in my communities if I don’t act on those beliefs? Thank you again.
Sincerely, P.
The Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder talks about “responsibility” in a different context, but one which I think sheds some light on the relevance of faith to social action. He uses it in talking about pacifism — the “responsible” course of action is to abandon pacifist naivete and use violence to prevent violence.
I think this conception of responsibility has a lot in common with the idea that it’s irresponsible to give up material security. In both cases, what’s “responsible” is to accumulate and use coercive power (in one case, directly through the use of force; in the other, the privileges of wealth, which are backed up by the coercive power of the state) in order to achieve desirable, even noble, ends.
Yoder’s response to this — one that initially didn’t work for me, but which I’ve found increasingly compelling — is that as Christians, it’s not given to us to worry about responsibility in this sense. Since we can’t possibly know all the possible consequences of our actions, no matter how much power we accumulate and how much force we use, we can’t ever be assured of success. So our job is not to worry about consequences — our job is to do what’s right, and leave the rest to God.
Yoder talks about activism in terms of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God, but in secular terms what he’s talking about is the anarcho-syndicalist idea of creating the seed of the new society within the shell of the old. By living as though the Kingdom of God (which, for Yoder, involves radical sharing and the abandonment of coercion) is already here, we help to usher it in.
I think what I’m getting at is that renunciation of worldly power is much easier when you believe that you can contribute to the creation of a new society as much through your powerlessness as through your power — and that, on a fundamental level, that belief is almost always based in faith, not reason.
Hi Tyrone–thank you so much for this post, and thank you everyone for your posts. You’re all helping me think about things I want to think about. I’ve had this on the mind a lot since I read it. I’ve been thinking about spirituality and how important it is for me to act from faith for justice rather than acting from a lot of other things I could–from guilt, from anxiety, from habit, from comfort. If I really believe my liberation is tied up with other people’s, I breathe deeper and act different. I get in touch with the reality (as my friend Erika reminded me recently) that as a person with wealth, the anxiety I have about money is NOT about whether I will be able to survive–if I give away all the wealth I am inheriting, that is still not at stake. What is at stake is about a security tied to a need to have so much underneath me that it keeps me far away from other people and makes me feel a power (to me connected to whiteness) about having something to give to my children and people around me that prevents us from being affected by the crisis and end-of-the-world moment we are creating for other people. Yuck. I don’t want to live that way. It does NOT make me act with openness–it makes me act closed, trying to protect that greed and hide the guilt that goes with it. SO I need faith for a lot of things. For believing that I can let go of that greed (oh everyone should listen to “Greed” by Sweet Honey in the Rock) and a need for the thing-that-is-not-just-security but about a lot of other things like white privilege and owning-class privilege. For finding another way to live and another way to feel tied to center. Faith that we can build communities that are about wealth redistribution as a part of an ongoing search for JUSTICE. And I need to grow a lot of faith in myself–because for me, one of the things that holds class privilege and wealth in place is a deep belief that without that, I couldn’t do it–that I am not capable enough or strong enough to make a life and living for myself if I am not defined by always having access to wealth (which, as Tyrone points out, because of the people around me, I likely always will in a lot of ways). A lot of my prayers lately have been for questioning what I know. I think I want to add a prayer for letting go. I don’t want to build centeredness on material over-security or on ego (from anything–and lately I’ve been thinking I really don’t want to build it on ego of working for social justice). I’m not sure what I do want to build it on–I’m questioning for that too. (If anyone has ideas, let me know.) So those are some thoughts.
I really REALLY appreciate this blog. Thank you Tyrone Boucher and Dean Spade and other folks.
Thank you so much for these reflections, Sarah! I’m really moved and impressed by the way you’re thinking about this stuff. I’ve been continually thinking about these themes as well – what I keep coming back to is that for me, spirituality is fundamentally about connectedness, to other people and to my own humanity, and so it requires challenging the isolation and individualism that capitalism creates. That connectedness is what I want to build my own centeredness on, as you say.
Hi Tyrone–thank you so much for this post, and thank you everyone for your posts. You’re all helping me think about things I want to think about. I’ve had this on the mind a lot since I read it. I’ve been thinking about spirituality and how important it is for me to act from faith for justice rather than acting from a lot of other things I could–from guilt, from anxiety, from habit, from comfort. If I really believe my liberation is tied up with other people’s, I breathe deeper and act different. I get in touch with the reality (as my friend Erika reminded me recently) that as a person with wealth, the anxiety I have about money is NOT about whether I will be able to survive–if I give away all the wealth I am inheriting, that is still not at stake. What is at stake is about a security tied to a need to have so much underneath me that it keeps me far away from other people and makes me feel a power (to me connected to whiteness) about having something to give to my children and people around me that prevents us from being affected by the crisis and end-of-the-world moment we are creating for other people. Yuck. I don’t want to live that way. It does NOT make me act with openness–it makes me act closed, trying to protect that greed and hide the guilt that goes with it. SO I need faith for a lot of things. For believing that I can let go of that greed (oh everyone should listen to “Greed” by Sweet Honey in the Rock) and a need for the thing-that-is-not-just-security but about a lot of other things like white privilege and owning-class privilege. For finding another way to live and another way to feel tied to center. Faith that we can build communities that are about wealth redistribution as a part of an ongoing search for JUSTICE. And I need to grow a lot of faith in myself–because for me, one of the things that holds class privilege and wealth in place is a deep belief that without that, I couldn’t do it–that I am not capable enough or strong enough to make a life and living for myself if I am not defined by always having access to wealth (which, as Tyrone points out, because of the people around me, I likely always will in a lot of ways). A lot of my prayers lately have been for questioning what I know. I think I want to add a prayer for letting go. I don’t want to build centeredness on material over-security or on ego (from anything–and lately I’ve been thinking I really don’t want to build it on ego of working for social justice). I’m not sure what I do want to build it on–I’m questioning for that too. (If anyone has ideas, let me know.) So those are some thoughts.
I really REALLY appreciate this blog. Thank you Tyrone Boucher and Dean Spade and other folks.