Crash Your Money-Centered Mind
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Matthew 6:24-27
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
Ecclesiastes 5:10-12 (responsive reading for live service)
Whoever loves money never has enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
This too is meaningless.
As goods increase,
so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owners
except to feast their eyes on them?
The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether they eat little or much,
but as for the rich, their abundance permits them no sleep.
Read the written message below with music videos
I entirely relate to worrying about money. With debt, current obligations, and future ambitions, it can seem inescapable. That’s what makes Christ’s open and interreligious teachings so poignant for us, in a way he’s striking at a source of a lot of our frustrations, personal and interpersonal. Like the teachings of the Buddha, Krishna, and others, many of Christ’s teachings do this: strike at the heart of what keeps us away from our heart and the peace inherent to it. If we follow his pointings, we find that our “burden is light,” but how might we follow something so at odds with the way our minds so often work?
Well, firstly, we have to come to terms with how radical a shift in perspective what Christ is asking from us. He is asking us to actively let go of our hold on our ruminating, worrying mind. Instead, he blesses us by asking us to turn to our very light of consciousness, letting our mind’s thoughts rise and fall as they may. But, without so much investment and identification with them.
This may seem tricky at first, but it’s worth some time. This kind of turning within is a key that many sages encourage in different ways. Christ does it by telling us to turn to God, to the heaven within, while letting go of our deep yearnings, extensive plans, and attachments. This doesn’t mean walking away from everything, but instead, loosening our tight grip on anything. He puts this in many ways, but key among them is telling us that we are the very light of the world, and so this practice tasks us with coming to know the light of our consciousness instead of getting so lost in the worries, passing pleasures, and misgivings.
That’s what worrying about money is. When we’re worrying, we by definition are missing our inner light: the love and peace at our very root of being. In a way, this quest to stop worrying becomes metaphysical – what are we truly? Beyond religious belief, you can look for yourself and you might notice that your very consciousness is beyond your worries and trappings. These things arise in them, like smells or sounds. When we place too much emphasis in them, in any of our thoughts, however, they proliferate, bogging down our everyday life until we feel defined by them. Tell me, what did you worry about when you were a baby?
Not worrying doesn’t mean not being responsible. Indeed, when we worry, we often shirk responsibility! Or we go too far in our striving to shore up our worries and we forget to stop and smell the roses. Worse, we miss the aroma of peace, joy, and love that is said to be natural to our very life. How cruel if in this life we don’t come to know this for ourselves.
God has spoken through many prophets across the ages, some probably more on the level than others. But what would you want to hear from a prophet? Christ’s message wasn’t one of exclusivism, far from it. Instead, he pointed to the very closeness of God and heaven with everyone, telling us that heaven is within and that we are all children of God. He, like others, gave us teachings that sought to strike away our attachments to types of thinking that poison our inner well, for our sake.
But he did have some teachings that seemed quite exclusive, although I think that they are either ignored or misunderstood. He told us that we have to become like children again to find heaven, what could he have meant by this? It must have something to do with re-adopting a childlike mind so that we can escape the hells we’ve created for ourselves. He also taught that through him we find God. You see, he understood that he was the light of the world, consciousness and love itself... and so are you. To go through Christ is to go through your own inner light and discover your rootedness in the God known by many names: Krishna, Goddess, Jehovah, Consciousness, the living energy behind the universe itself. His words weren’t meant to divide, but to point us to our intrinsic unity.
Typically, a large source of our worrying about money is also the source of our arrogance when we have much of it. In today’s world, even in religious settings, we are generally taught to identify with our successes, failures, image, bodies, histories, feelings, and ways of thinking. Unfortunately, our over-investment in this side of our mind undermines our awareness of our very being, the ground that is our consciousness. Although we tend to miss it in favour of our collective mindset, many of our scriptures encourage us to look beyond these misidentifications, to the very place that we perceive these things from. This light of consciousness is something we all share, no matter our tradition or culture. You could say this beingness is indigenous within, everything else is either a natural, passing outgrowth of practical thinking or a misappropriated and colonizing ignorance and habitual confusion.
I have to admit, this message is for me too. Money can easily weigh heavily with so many things chipping away at it, with debts due, obligations, the necessities of life, and rampant inflation. But if the sages the world over are to be believed, when we allow life to run things, to take us where it will, we will find that life supports life and that we are ultimately taken care of far better than we could do for ourselves (in the limited sense of the term). This attunement starts with our inner life. By tuning down the sound from our mind’s chatter and our investment in our reactivity and projective thinking, limiting our identification with the things perceived in our heads, we can uncover the natural, spacious light within. Christ tells us not to serve two masters, but we each can decide for ourselves: either keep following our money-mind or turn to the God of riches at our very core.
Peace to you,
Cory