Money has never made anyone rich

-  "Rabbi, what are your thoughts concerning money?” the disciple asked his master.
-  "Look through the window," says the master.  "What do you see?”
-  "I see a woman with a child, a cart drawn by two horses and a man on his way to the market."
-  "Good. Now look into this mirror and what do you see?"
-  "What do you want me to see, Master? I see me, myself, obviously."
-  "Then consider this: the window is made of glass, the mirror also.  A fine layer of silver behind the glass is enough to make the man see only himself."

A Whole and a Part
The human life is founded on two principles: freedom and equality.  For human beings to live authentically they have to be free and independent; however, since they don't live alone but coexist with others, the value of freedom needs to be harmonized with the value of equality.  Others with whom human beings coexist are equal to them in dignity.

Freedom defines humans as personal and individual beings; equality defines them as social beings. The love of money is regressive because it causes a person to regress and stay in the egocentric stage of child development thus denying the principle of equality.  Human beings are defined, at the same time, individually as a whole because they are free and independent; socially they are defined as a part since they are always part of a family, a people, a society within which they establish relations of equality.

These two principles correspond to the two Commandments:
Love your God above all things - is the only guarantee of freedom; to give God our heart, in paying homage only to Him, we are free from everyone and of everything; we can consider ourselves free only when our love for God is above all other loves.

Love others as we love ourselves -  is to say that I am equal to my neighbour and my neighbour is equal to me, that the love I owe myself, I owe in equal measures to my neighbour; the esteem that I ought to give others should not be any less than my own self-esteem. Social life is only possible when there is altruism, when the other is "an alter ego", meaning another me; it is through sharing at all levels, including material goods, that life in society is possible.

With psychoanalysis in mind, we should never incorporate, declare or make ours what does not belong to us. Since we are temporal beings, our belongings are fleeting; in reality we are owners of nothing, only God is the Lord of all and everything, for all eternity.  One has never seen a U-Haul truck as part of the funeral procession that goes to the cemetery.  People who define themselves by their possessions are poor because they live with the insecurity of losing what they will eventually lose anyway.  People who define themselves, by who they are, possess a wealth that not even death can corrupt.

Coming to terms with the fact that we are not owners of anything not even of our own lives, we need to sincerely consider ourselves as stewards, both of our life and our resources for which one day we will be called to account.

When in our mind we are able to substitute the chip in our brain that says "owner” with "steward" a sense of dispassion and detachment from material goods invades our mind. This new mentality is indispensable for spiritual growth, as a person who is free and independent but at the same time part of a community. When all worship God as their father, all should relate to each other as brothers.

To Be or To Have
St. Anthony, St. Benedict, St. Francis of Assisi and many others, also men from other religions, relinquished their possessions as they saw in them an obstacle to personal growth.  They realized that they could not serve both God and money (Lk.16:13) and that to have and to be were antagonistic.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his book titled "To Have or to Be?" focuses on this theme, for him there are two ways to live, one based on "to have" and the other on "to be". For Fromm, the one who has is defined by what he owns and these belongings define who he is; Fromm noted that only by living in the manner of "to be" one is truly free. Living in the way of "being", people are active and are subjects of their actions; living in the manner of "having", people are busy, preoccupied and doing things that are even against their will.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Mt.6:19-21)

Those whose worth are defined by what they have are insecure, they live in the fear of thieves, of changes in economy and politics, of rise and fall in the stock market, of suffering, of illness, of death, they suffer from chronic anxiety in relation to health and to all that they have and could lose. If I am what I am no one can threaten my safety nor my sense of self-worth, because my center, my heart, is focused on what I am inside not on what I have outside my being.

"Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell". (Mt.10:28)

While the "to have" is something that is consumed with use, the "to be" is something that grows with practice; think how much we can do with our talents and virtues; these increase when we use them while material goods decrease when they are used or given away. For those who live in the way of "to have", to love is to possess another and  feel jealousy when a potential rival comes along. For those who live in the manner of "to be", to love is to give up ourselves and surrender to others, wanting their good and putting ourselves at their service.

Greed is the Poverty of the Rich
"The less you are and the less you express your own life, the more you have, and the greater is your  alienation," said Karl Marx. Jesus expressed this long before when he said, "No one can serve both God and mammon" (Lk16:13). This means that in our lives, we cannot conjugate or express at the same time the verbs, to Have and to Be; since they are antagonistic, one excludes the other.  "A wise man is also poor or becomes poor" (Seneca); those who are wealthy materially are, by general rule, spiritually poor or vice-versa.

A poor man who is happy with what he has and does not waste his life in the search of more material wealth, is rich; whereas a rich man who is never satisfied with what he has and uses up all his life looking to have more, is poor.

It is a like an anorexic teenager self-deceived by a false perception of reality; she is so stubbornly determined in becoming slimmer that every time she looks at herself in the mirror she still sees her body as fat.  Her psychological disease prevents her from seeing the reality and instead of focusing on the thinness she has, she is focused on the thinness she can still obtain thus forcing herself to lose more weight risking death if not cured of her false perception of reality.

The rich is poor because his attention is not focused on what he already has, but on what he thinks he can still get thus spending all his time and energy on this objective.  Since there will always be someone richer than him, he always sees himself as still lacking something, so he sees himself as poor.  The poor is rich because he is content with what he has and spends his time and energy on being; the rich is poor because thinking he doesn't have enough, invests all his life on having more.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Possessors or possessed?

The secular clergy do not explicitly make vows of chastity and obedience, nevertheless, just like us, they are called to live by these two virtues.  Poverty is the vow that most characterizes the religious and one to which the parish priests to not make.

The religious live in a community, for this reason a religious order may even be rich but its members poor; because they don’t profit from that wealth.  The parish priests live alone, some are even poorer than the religious brothers but there are others who have amassed great wealth, resulting in disagreements among the nephews as they fight over who is to eventually inherit it. Because of this it is jokingly said: "To whom God does not give children, the devil gives nephews".

Primum vivere, deinde philsophari (To live comes first, then philosophize)
Some, concerned with high philosophies, forget that they have to work to sustain the basic necessities of their existence.  To this St. Paul said, "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" (2 Th.3:10).  It is work that generates the income that allows them to maintain the vital functions, or to stay alive.

“In truth, for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mk 8:35).  To live and to stay alive are the one and the same for animals, but not so for humans.  It is true that to live it is necessary to be alive, but the meaning and the purpose of a human life are certainly not just to stay alive.

On the contrary, you don’t live life by keeping it but by giving it up day by day or at once for something, a good cause, or someone.  In this the gospel is clear; you lose what you retain and gain what you give away. Living is using up all one’s time, energy and resources in pursue of a dream, an ideal, an ambition that has to do with a noble cause. In this regards my life is of absolute value to others but of comparative value to myself. The good cause to which I devote my life is the absolute not life itself.

Material goods, therefore, have nothing to do with life but only with staying alive, to maintain the vital functions. Whoever dedicates his entire life to amassing wealth, which is only a means of life, is not really living it; he is simply preserving what eventually he will lose as he has no power to preserve it indefinitely. He may well arrive at the point of possessing enough wealth to afford to live not only one but two or three lives. But, like everybody else he has just one and one that was not well lived but foolishly wasted. Those who live their lives as if they are never going to die will end up dying as if they had never lived…

Psychoanalysis of Ownership
When we read the popular tales that speak of money turned into feces, and vice versa -- according to Freud -- it is only a reference as to how the concept of possessing money or other goods, first originated in our psyche.

In the narcissistic phase of development, feces are very important to a child, for the simple reason that they came out -- or originated --from his own body; this also reflects the elevated value or esteem the child places on himself.  The mother reinforces this characteristic when she becomes overly concerned with the child during episodes of constipation.  When finally, the child has a bowel movement, he shows and exhibits with pride the feces to his mother who becomes overjoyed.

According to Freud, when the child, after a bowel movement, contemplates his highly regarded feces, that came out of him, he feels that he has lost something of value that belonged to him which should have stayed inside; realizing that he is unable to put them back, he declares them his which essentially or symbolically means he wants to incorporate and return them into himself.

As it is said, from the point of view of psychoanalyses, the love of material goods has its roots in the narcissistic phase, or the anal phase, of a child's development.  In this phase, the child is predominantly egocentric; he hasn't developed the capacity to feel affection for others, not even the capacity to love or to hate which are realities that belong to the next phase of development, the genital phase.

Possessors or possessed?
 “If riches increases, do not set your heart on them” (Ps. 62:10).
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Lk. 12:34).

Unfortunately the rich young man in the gospel of Matthew (19:16-23) decided to keep his riches when Jesus invited him to choose between material wealth and spiritual wealth. The gospel says that he became sad in face of his own decision; material wealth can be a source of pleasure which is followed by sadness most of the times. On the contrary, spiritual wealth is always a source of joy; a joy that springs up from the inside, like the water Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman, and becomes everlasting.

The rich young man refused to follow the master at the prospect of losing his wealth, his false sense of security paralyzed him.  To follow the master was what motivated him to approach Jesus in the first place, but his riches got hold of him and would not let him go. He was not the master of his own destiny; he was not able to give himself up and follow Jesus, because he was already taken, or possessed by the things he thought he possessed.

What happened to the rich young man happens to all who give their hearts to wealth, it is like selling one's soul to the devil.  From that moment onwards, possessing becomes an illusion since we only possess in accounting terms because psychologically as well as spiritually we are possessed. In financial terms we may have a large bank account but as soon as we give our hearts to that money and start loving it, then the psychological and spiritual realities show that the bank account has us.

If the object of love is the material goods, then a strange symbiosis occurs, between the person and the material goods that he loves.  Symbiosis is defined as a relationship of mutual benefit and dependency between two living organisms.  There is a trade off or sharing between the two; the material goods share the matter, so the person who loves material goods becomes materialized; the person shares his spirit, so the material goods become in a way spiritualized. The love of wealth turns a person into matter and matter into a person; so the subject who previously was said to own has now become owned.

Money is a good slave as it can be used to do lots of things, but a bad master because it may enslave you if you let yourself be seduced by it. When and if that happens, from that time on, it is the wealth that controls your life and not the other way around.  Since material goods only keep us alive, those who spend most of their time and energy looking for them live just to stay alive, and that is a tautology.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC