Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to re

Even after all this time The sun never says to the earth, “You owe Me.” Look what happens with a love like that, It lights the Whole Sky. —Hafiz

an economics that restores to wholeness our fractured communities, relationships, cultures, ecosystems, and planet.

It is, in a word, a story, existing in social reality along with such things as laws, nations, institutions, calendar and clock time, religion, and science. Stories bear tremendous creative power.

Money is a system of social agreements, meanings, and symbols that develops over time.

Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift

Money is no exception. Its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance.

That is why reductionist science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks.

What is this “home that was always there,” this “truth that has always existed”? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself.

Today we live under a barrage of sameness, of impersonality.