Money Talks No. 1: A Bank Note

by Dan Masterton

There are some time periods during the year where I struggle – the gift-giving season around Christmas, the run-up to my kids’ birthdays, the moments when I find out a large expense is about to be necessary, among others.

It’s not grief; it’s not stress; it’s not anxiety or depression. It is frustration.

I get frustrated with all the things.

Whether or not what’s going on is actually all that bad – it often probably isn’t – to me it often feels like there is just so much buying, so much money, so much consuming. It feels like the need to have a ton of food, a ton of gifts, a ton of decoration, and more becomes the focus rather than the person or occasion for which people gathered to celebrate. It feels like the impulse to shop and buy, to spend more and more money, to get more and more things, to run up higher and higher tabs so easily gets out of control, or even is so unchecked or mindless that the costly tabs and preponderance of things purchased is largely unnoticed.

I certainly don’t aspire to be an ascetic or a mendicant, which is beyond my spirituality. Io want to figure out ways to live out Catholic Social Teaching more fully. I feel drawn to care for God’s Creation, to consume responsibly and minimally; I feel called to opt for people who are marginalized, not least by minimizing my consumption and giving of time and treasure in charity for people in need. I find peace and an attractive tension in the often prophetic, countercultural threads of what these CST themes and others challenge us to think and do.

Intellectually and spiritually, I enjoy nuance and tension. I like going to those places where simple black-and-white answers fail, and, instead, complex, overlapping shades of gray must be sought. The tough part is that the considerations that go into money and spending and things aren’t totally abstract; in daily life, I am immersed in how others talk and act, and have to figure out how to reconcile how my choices may affect people close to me. It’s different to have a think on some hypothetical philosophical question than to figure out how to react to a close friend or family member spending more money or buying more things than I would.

So, on the one hand, one could easily just become relativistic. As others make choices and act, I could just rationalize that their principles are totally subjective to their personalities. I could say what’s morally right for me is different from what’s morally right for them, and I need not react in any meaningful way.

Or, one could be a bit of a policeman, an enforcement arm for the absolute truths we believe and hold in the Christian tradition. When I see greed and gluttony, I could vociferously call it out, bringing others to task for their excesses.

Visual approximation
of a nothing-burger.

The former would make me feel like a vanilla nothing-burger. The latter would too easily magnify the jackass judgmentalist that does exist within me. Neither of them are any good. There has to be a describable, worthwhile third way. There has to be a way that is neither abrasively, rudely austere nor relativistically consumerist. The deeply-seated moderate streak in my personality insists on it.

That’s what I want to try to describe here this month. How can I love my close friends and family, even if they often act in ways that I think are excessive and perhaps potentially harmful? How do I think about this stuff and act in a way that models something I think is good and just but stops short of imposing it on them? How can I make space for my wife and kids to have fun and enjoy themselves without being too much of a miserly killjoy? What are areas that I think are troubling or problematic when it comes to money and things, and then what are meaningful, worthwhile ways to save and dedicate resources toward?

I want to share some favorite practices for my trial-and-error minimalist life, talk through some partly open-ended things that make me feel squishy, and share some elements that give me hope for navigating a good middle course.

I am not out to judge. I try, and often fail, to avoid hypocrisy. But as usual, I think there’s some merit in clumsily slogging my way toward something in a reflection. So I would like to give it a shot.