Why focus on Wealthy People?
How does a person of faith,
possessing disproportionate material privilege, live with integrity?
Can money move rightly in the world in service to justice
and in alignment with the Holy Spirit?
How does Love speak to money? How does money act in Love?1
Wisdom & Money invites people who self-identify as wealthy to engage with money as a doorway to spiritual transformation. Focusing on supporting people of wealth is our unique call within the larger movement for economic justice.
Most social and spiritual justice work focuses on “the poor” or “the oppressed,” with the primary engagement with people of wealth as funders or as “the oppressors.” All of us are caught and harmed by injustice and inequity, and all of us need spiritual and social transformation in service of the commonwealth. Economic justice for all must include supporting the transformation of everyone, particularly those often most enmeshed within the unjust economic system—people of wealth.
Just as men can be the most blind to the daily reality of sexism—since the patriarchal system was set up to give power and access to males—wealthy people can be the most blind to the daily reality of economic injustice and inequality. Our national economic system was set up to give power and access to white wealthy men and corporations. In truth, the economic and patriarchal system is destructive to everyone, men and women, rich and poor. For example, our current system encourages the building up of private assets far beyond what is needed to thrive (also called greed) and supports the ineffective use of accumulation to addictively “cope” with the emotions inevitably stirred up in this unjust culture—fear, isolation, scarcity.
For people of faith awake to global inequities, however, personal wealth can feel like an overwhelming and shameful burden. Worldly wisdom and business “best practices” offer little support to those seeking integrity. Wisdom & Money, however, sees money as “symbol of human interconnectedness,” knowing that “the more we are able to bring our relationship with money into alignment with the Holy Spirit, the more divine love can move into the world through us, through our money.”1 Good news indeed!
Wisdom & Money is audacious enough to open up explorations of all aspects of our relationship to money as the primary place of practice. The journey forward is to seek spiritual transformation first, trusting that justice and equity flow from a transformed heart.
Wisdom & Money’s call is to serve people of wealth. But it never stops there. Most who walk this journey are drawn into cross-class partnerships.
Read more about Why Diverse Partnerships? (which is one of the places Wisdom & Money intersects with Be Present, Inc.)
Read more about why Wisdom & Money uses the Be Present Empowerment Model as a core practice.
Read More about Wisdom & Money Core Practices.
Read More about a Collaboration in Mississippi.
1. Quotes from Wisdom & Money website
Drawing by Khara Scott-Bey from Big Topics at Midnight