For the hatred of money...

"For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil..." -1 Timothy 6:10

I usually picture greedy people with money signs for eyeballs when I hear this, or imagine fast-talking Wall Street bankers from the 80's with big hair and mustaches, expensive suits, and rolls of $100 bills in their pockets.

But do you really have to be greedy to let money get the better of you?

It is tempting for anyone to believe that your income is reflective of your self-worth. And although our society pays engineers more than teachers, bankers more than artists, this should never be taken as an assessment of one's worth. It is much easier to measure an engineer's output and utility to society than a teacher's; however, the impact that a teacher can make is immeasurable and largely unknown to anyone but the student. A banker's profit can easily be counted, but the impact that art has on those who experience it can only be sensed within the heart and soul of the viewer or audience member.

I have never thought of myself as a greedy person, but sometimes I become so acutely aware of the "injustice" I see in artists' paychecks, or lack thereof, that the danger of loving money easily preys on me. But it takes a sort of opposite form, actually. I find myself hating money, its very concept, and the fact that I as a human being can be enslaved to it even if in my heart is not greed, but bitterness. Disguised in this bitterness is a multitude of ugly things that exist because I somehow deem them to be more acceptable than greed: pride due to an inflated sense of self-worth, jealousy that artists do not produce capital easily assigned value by society, and the allowance of money as a concept into the crevices of my heart and mind where I want only God to live.

The danger in the love of money lies largely in its control over one's thoughts and actions. Ironically, my own innocent attempts to be frugal can allow it to do the same thing.

Here is an excerpt from New York artist Makoto Fujimura's Refractions, a newsletter he sends out monthly that is chock-full of wisdom and beautiful writing:

"So, if Joshua Bell with his 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius cannot stop people, none of us who creates music, art or work in iambic pentameters should expect much. But then what good are the arts? Why would artists spend time collaborating, spending days working on something that would not be well paid, or pay nothing at all, without anyone to stop to take it in? But we should note that this wasteful excess is being exercised in many hidden places, in homes where a child protégé plays his violin, on the canvases of self-taught artists, or on a humble square table filled with poetry. They may or may not turn out to be Joshua Bells, or Grandma Moses or Emily Dickinsons, but the prerequisite for the arts never seem to be a guarantee of an audience, or income. Artists are clearly not driven by mere monetary capital, but they are driven by another form of capital - creative and relational capital, the discovery of new ideas and thoughts and cultural geography."