Spencer Sherman, top wealth advisor and CEO of the values-based financial advisory firm Abacus Wealth Partners, has teamed up with Earthdance to bring you true financial peace. In this regular column, Spencer shares expertise, stories and insight on how to make peace with money from the inside out, how to attract more wealth into your life and into the global community, and how to experience ease and joy around your finances. Learn more about Spencer, take his enlightening money madness quiz and think about money in a whole new way at www.curemoneymadness.com.

 

Many of us operate on the principle that money is somehow antithetical to peace.  We talk about having jobs that are well-paying or ethical, companies that are “corporate” and therefore bad.  We seek guidance from spiritual leaders who took vows of poverty and religious verses condemning the lust for money.  We focus on finding tranquility by releasing our attachment to the material world, in which money plays a starring role.

But what if the truth—money vs. peace, profit vs. ethics—just isn’t that black and white?

Consider MoveOn.org.   With 3.3 million members, MoveOn.org has used Internet-based, grassroots community organizing to raise many millions of dollars.  Those funds have paid for things like Viacom billboards reading "Inspections Work. War Won't." in major cities across the country, thousands of phone calls to Congress in advance of votes on torture and the war in Iraq, and DC rallies with tens of thousands of attendees exhorting the government to take action against genocide in Darfur.

From Patagonia to the Peace Corps to The Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, there are thousands of organizations creating and supporting peace using not just volunteers and vision, but money.  Cold, hard cash.  Lean, mean green.  (By the way—just look at the words we use to talk about money: cold, hard, and mean!)

The fact of the matter is that money is powerful, but it’s neither good nor bad—it’s neutral.  As neutral as a spoon, a wheelbarrow, a paperclip.  It’s simply a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good or ill.  A hammer can crash down on your finger or build a house. Fire can burn down your garden or cook your meals.  Money can generate suffering, or it can generate peace and progress; and rejecting money because it can cause suffering is like refusing a hammer while building your house because you might accidentally hit your finger. 

Rather than struggle to reject money because it’s bad, embrace money as a neutral tool, only as constructive or destructive as our intentions.  The nature and scope of its power directly depend on how we use it.

In our progressive communities, many of us have a negative knee-jerk reaction to money.  That reaction keeps us from seeing that money creates opportunities to improve the world.  When we don’t see the benevolent, constructive side of money, we reject it, and those opportunities are lost.

Get clear on the neutrality of money, and you’ll create possibilities.  Possibilities lead to opportunities.  Opportunities lead to change.  And in the hands of the progressive community, change leads to peace.

 

©2007 Financial Intimacy and Freedom and Earthdance.org. May not be reproduced without permission from the author.