Journal of Sacred Work

   After sex, money may be the most attention-getting word in the western world. If you ask college students today about their measure of success, most will tell you success and money are
interchangeable. Homer Simpson, with his unerring ability to articulate human appetite, describes our quest for money in this 30 second clip from YouTube.
Click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J028fEF0xbE&NR
   The luck of the stock market, or the lottery or a chance at American Idol – it’s all about money and fame.
   Over the past generation, has money become more or less important in our society? According to one poll, 85% of college students graduating in 1967 said the most important thing to them was finding a job that gave them a sense of meaning and purpose. By 2005, that percentage had dropped sharply to only 45%.
   The drop may be understandable if you consider the rising cost of advanced education and the need to pay off college loans. But what does this study tell us about the caregiving professions?…   

   No one gets rich becoming a nurse or a social worker or an x-ray technologist. No housekeeper or maintenance worker ever chose the job because they thought it was their ticket to Easy Street.  In
fact, during my three decades as a healthcare CEO, when caregivers would ask me about raises, I often said, "We’ll never be able to pay you enough for the hard work you do because you should be making a million dollars a year!" And this has always been true. Caregivers are chronically underpaid in dollars, yet the work can be the most rewarding of any career.
   Who makes millions in our world? Our society gives big money to people who work in money – financiers and bankers for example. I heard recently that Wall Street traders can make upwards of thirty million dollars in a good year. Some "retire" as early as thirty-five. High profile rich people also include heads of huge companies, like Microsoft, Exxon and Google, sports stars, and movie and television stars.
   But doctors, once thought to be almost automatically wealthy as soon as they entered the profession, are, in many cases today, making less money than the lowest paid member of a professional baseball team. Poet David Whyte reports than his wife, a psychiatrist, treats many physicians who come to her depressed because their 25-year-old patients are Microsoft millionaires while they, on the other hand, labor for $100,000 per year and must still pay off massive medical school debts.
   If there’s any good news in this, it comes from the results of another study. This one surveyed lottery winners and a range of others from the very rich to the very poor. The results of the study? The only meaningful difference was not between rich and middle class, but between people who had enough to live on and those living in poverty.
  This is not, of course, to say that the poor can’t be happy. It is to emphasize that a chronic lack of money creates hardships which impact the health, safety and quality of life for millions of Americans. But there is no meaningful difference in life happiness between those of us in the middle class and those who are very rich.
   The difference lies in the balance between how much we live for others and how much we live for self.
   Life’s payoff is not sitting in our bank account but in the life of our hearts and souls. Money doesn’t feed either. And if too much of our life energy is focused on money, our hearts and souls will suffer.
   But you knew this already, right?

• So what are your top life priorities?
• If you were independently wealthy, would you do your current job for free?
• How much of your attention is focused on the material world and how much on the life of the spirit?

   Each of us must answer these questions for ourselves. And one of the best ways to discover the answers is to consciously reflect on our life’s priorities.    
   When we engage in this kind of soulful reflection, we find that it is caregivers, the anonymous Samaritans of this world, who are living the richest lives. They know that it is only through Love that true joy is found.

-Erie Chapman