An Equinox Teaching: Jesus and the Capitalists

In a more balanced and naturally ordered society than ours, today would be a spontaneous national holiday, with no act of Congress or shuttered banks needed to formalize the occasion. What, after all, is more balanced, more ordered, more beautifully equal than the equinox?

The Declaration from which our nation sprang opens with an assertion of equality justified by the laws of Nature. How weak and distant that Declaration sounds today, in our society of privilege, exclusiveness, gross disparity, contempt for Nature, and rampant excess. As Dean Baker points out (again) today, our nation and Congress are owned by three mega-banks. There is no longer a balance of dark and light; we are virtually all dark, all matter and no energy. Even our so-called spirituality is dark matter that celebrates the superficial and the big grab: transparent crystal cathedrals built by mega-millionaire evangelists who demand that everyone but themselves live according to Christ’s teachings, whatever they were.

What, by the way, were those teachings? Consider, for instance, one of the rare instances of the Nazarene’s anger: the scene in the temple with the money-changers. This is one of the truly cool stories of the N.T., and it appears in every one of the Big Four gospels:

In the episode, Jesus is stated to have visited the Temple in Jerusalem, Herod’s Temple, at which the courtyard is described as being filled with livestock and the tables of the money changers, who changed the standard Greek and Roman money for Jewish and Tyrian money, which were the only coinage that could be used in Temple ceremonies. According to the Gospels, Jesus took offense to this extorting profit from the people to hear the word of God. Creating a whip from some cords, he drives out the moneychangers and turns over their tables, and the tables of the people selling doves. However, he did no harm to the doves themselves, perhaps respecting their innocence and fragility.

This might possibly have something to tell us about how to handle BofA, Citi, and Goldman, d’ya think? The Hippie From Heaven lets the corporate stooges have the cat-o-nine-tails treatment, even as he avoids harming the creatures of Nature. His message is very clear: when profit becomes the god of a society, Nature is enslaved and defiled, and the natural balance between dark and light, getting and giving, abundance and virtue, becomes distorted, lost amid the fog of fear that drives the cult of accumulation.

I have had a few clients in counseling who are Christians, and I have occasionally evoked the parable of the money-changers to illustrate, in a context familiar to them, the principle of inner cleansing. Think of that temple as your mind, your psyche; and of Jesus as the energy of your inner truth: what is happening there? The inner demons of fear, control, and corruption are being “whipped” out of you, and the balance of your true self is being restored. It is very much an equinox-moment of the mind.

In a Ming-dynasty Taoist text, the teachings of that gospel story are recapitulated:

Fame is hated by Creation, profit is an object of emotional contention. Therefore fame and profit are more fatal than weapons…[for] with the way fame and profit kill, people will go to their deaths unrepentant. There is great harm for the world concealed within great profit, but people do not know it…they are blinded by profit…Wealth can support the body, but it can also damage the body. Therefore people with a lot of wealth may want to leave worry and apprehension behind but cannot.

Remarkably, this very message is echoed in Baker’s column today (link above):

In fact, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke had the gall to argue against an audit of the Fed, warning that it would lead to increased instability.

Did Bernanke forget that less than a year ago he told Congress that the policies pursued by him and his predecessor had brought the economy to the brink of a complete collapse? How do you get less stable than that?

So we are out of balance, unstable; our culture’s “temple” has been overtaken by the money-changers; our Declaration of Independence has been trampled into the mud of dependence and emotional slavery. In such a moment, it can never hurt to witness the example of Nature. This particular day of the autumnal equinox — long a celebration of the harvest, of thanksgiving, of the equality that imbues and connects all the forms of Nature, humans included — would be an optimal moment to start.