Since our parish started a consideration of money & the spiritual life (prompted by Andrew Geleris' Money & Salvation), two piercing statements on wealth have crossed my path.
From St Nikolai Velimirovich's Prologue for September 9, the commemoration of Saints Joachim & Anna, parents of the Mother of God:
Joachim & Anna had lived together in marriage for fifty years, and yet had remained barren. They lived devoutly & quietly, and of all their income they spent one third on themselves, distributed one third to the poor and gave the other third to the Temple, and they were well provided for.
From a report on the reception of a woman into monastic life in Croatia. The bishop remarked:
Sister Paraskeva, who has a master’s degree in economics and worked in a bank, realized that the world economy is the opposite of the spiritual economy, where you have as much as you earn, as much as you accumulate funds or take from others. However, in the spiritual economy you get as much as you give—it moves in the opposite direction. She understood that and followed that type of economy and offered God the highest thing that a person can offer—herself.
So many of us struggle with the concept of the tithe, but the tithe is at best a foundation, one that falls far short (I think) of Christ's teaching on money. We all need a sufficiency (or do we? Many desert saints have given up all and lived in complete trust of God's provision). But what is that sufficiency? Oddly, an Evangelical Christian musician, Rich Mullins (d. 1997) comes to my mind. Though quite successful as a performer, he resolved to live on the average income of an American laborer, giving the remainder of his earnings to charity. We could come up with any number of practical systems, though I find St Joachim & Anna's wonderfully appealing. Remembering Andrew Geleris' admonition that giving is for the sake of our salvation more than for any practical end, perhaps we can proceed by abandoning ourselves more fully to God rather than to our own constructed systems. ___
Image: Coptic Icon of Sts Joachim & Anna
___ IC XC NIKA
About John Brady
Occasional thoughts, mostly about the Orthodox Church.
