When pastor asked me to speak this evening, he didn't tell me what the subject was to be. He simply said he'd write me a letter. When it came, I was grateful that he asked me to speak about what my faith has meant to me during my spiritual journey. For conveniently, I was just finishing a book entitled Why Religion Matters, which had just been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The book was written by Huston Smith, one of the leading authorities on the various world religions. One of the simple things that he points out is that perhaps uniquely of the world's great faiths, Judeo-Christianity teaches a most personal God. Frankly, I had never thought about that as being unique. But apparently, few faiths go to the lengths ours does to refer to God as Father, Son, Rabbi, Good Shepherd and other terms of personhood. So I would like to use various personal terms to describe what our faith has meant to me during the past five decades.

Friend

During the earliest part of my journey, our faith helped me to see God largely as a friend. As I've served as your president during the past year, many of you have grown to know me as a prosperous investment advisor and author. But I actually grew up quite poor on a remote farm outside Lexington, Kentucky. I lived a rather monastic existence. Our world was very simple. We worked from Monday to Saturday and we worshipped on Sunday. I was rather idealistic about people. After all, the people I saw at church on Sunday looked pretty good compared to the cows I had socialized with the previous six days! My life revolved around our tiny Baptist church. It used to award pins for a year of perfect attendance at Sunday School. I once collected about six of them in a row. Each night, I read a book of Bible stories before going to sleep. And I remember not only praying but simply talking to God just as if he were working beside me as I spent day after day on the back of the farm.

Distant Cousin

As I journeyed into college and my years as an Army officer, I became smarter and more self-sufficient. In less need of a friend, God became a distant cousin. I remained vaguely aware that we had been close during my youth but I was now simply too busy to call or drop by very often. I studied political science at the University of Kentucky. I can assure you that the Protestant Reformation played a major role in the development of democratic capitalism, our system of political-economy. But I don't remember it being discussed much in class. It seemed that God was like that crazy cousin that people used to keep locked in the attic.

Close Cousin

Sherry and I were married in 1976. While on our honeymoon in Florida, we visited Cypress Gardens. While she wouldn't want me to tell you this, Sherry is an accomplished skier. And before we left the ski show that day, Sherry was promised a job if we would move to the area. Proving that God directs our paths in unanticipated directions, we moved to Winter Haven a few weeks later. It wasn't long before we joined the local Episcopal Church, primarily due to the influence of one of Sherry's new friends. God grew a little closer. Sherry didn't ski very long and quickly began to manage several Ethan Allen furniture stores. I began my career with Merrill Lynch. In reality, God still wasn't as high a priority as our pursuit of "success."

Immediate Family

By 1986, our careers had prompted us to move to Plant City, a bedroom community of Tampa, where our son Garrett was born. God moved back into our immediate family. Perhaps you have heard the saying, "My children saved me from toxic self-absorption." It did seem that Garrett made us more conscious of the world we were creating for him and his friends. I became the president of my local Episcopal Church. I also began volunteering as the planned giving officer for over one hundred churches on the West coast of Florida. That prompted me to begin studying what the Bible has to say about money. Much to my surprise, I discovered that it had helped people with financial matters long before the field of economics, much less Alan Greenspan, was even thought of. I began teaching those principles in churches.

Back at the office, I was in the midst of the roaring 80's. Perhaps you remember those days of junk bonds, junk savings and loan certificates of deposit, limited partnerships, penny stocks and so on. I was now a senior vice president with the corner office and an income that this farm boy never dreamed of. But I felt my world was spinning out of control. Friends in high places on the Street told me stories that probably contributed to my hair being as curly as it is today. Despite the assurances of our advertising, I didn't know who I could trust. And I wasn't happy.

I thought seriously about quitting the Street and going to seminary. One of the initial steps is to spend a few days with the church's psychologist. He basically explained that I was largely seeking to escape the stress in my life. We discussed that the oldest saying on Wall Street is that people make investment decisions out of fear or greed. (If you are fearful you will probably invest in government-guaranteed bonds or CD's but if you are greedy you might day-trade Internet stocks.) But Judeo-Christianity teaches faith and charity. Fear...faith. Greed...charity. Essentially, I was teaching opposite movitators in my office from Monday to Friday and in our churches on Saturday and Sunday. The stress was impoverishing me. It probably didn't enrich those I taught.

I later told my seminary board that if I attended seminary, I'd like to study the relationships between spirit and money. They replied that it wasn't taught. Not in one seminary. Not in one sub-course. I replied that it had been a favorite subject of Moses, Jesus and Paul. You know: thou shalt not covet, the eye of the needle, the root of all evil and so on. The board essentially replied: "That may be but we don't teach it. Why don't you go off, self-study it, come back and tell us what you've learned?" Episcopalian leaders are not alone in being willfully ignorant about spirit and money. Perhaps you saw the feature article concerning a Lutheran Brotherhood survey in our local paper about a year ago. It said that most Lutherans think it is "inappropriate to discuss money and material possessions at their place of worship. At the same time, most of those surveyed didn't know that money and the things it can buy are the most frequently discussed topics in the Bible." When we were asked an open-ended question about what is in the Bible, "only 2 percent cited money as a common Biblical subject."

Wise Teacher

It's often said that we teach what we want to learn. That has certainly been true during my journey. I wrote my first book for the Episcopal Church. It had printed several publications about giving. But when my contact laid the manuscript on the publisher's desk, she asked, "What does investing have to do with religion?" From the church's perspective, stewardship is typically about what we give, which is what the Bible calls tithing, alms and the temple tax. But from a biblical perspective, stewardship is actually about how we tend our sheep, goats, lands and so on. Stewardship theologians believe the word "steward" derived from a word which meant "keeper of the pigs," not "giver to the temple."

The church may never be relevant to a money culture meditating on the word of Alan Greenspan until church leaders listen carefully to those theologians. Yet my contact at church headquarters sadly suggested that I show the manuscript to commercial publishers. After it went commercial and people indeed seemed at least as interested in stewardship as giving, publishers asked me to write four more books. I'm now working on two more. I speak often at churches, colleges and national assemblies. Each time I do, God teaches me something new. Yet learning to believe in God's stewardship principles has been the relatively easy part. I deal with the difficult part at my investment firm each day as I try to help my clients actually practice what Christians have believed for millennia. Religious sociologists call this "integration," as opposed to "compartmentalization" which allows us to keep belief and the way we live apart. Theologians call the intersection of belief and practice "praxis," which is actually the name of the Mennonite mutual funds that refuse to invest in endeavors that are contrary to Mennonite beliefs. As my daily work indicates we unwittingly own most of the industries our ministers preach against, we could learn a great deal by studying how the Mennonites and other Anabaptists integrate their faith and investing. We might also note that sociologists say they suffer far less mental illness than Americans in general.

God The Sociologist

I had long understood my profession as basically helping those with money to get more money. So I've had to learn one more very important thing about spirit and money. The Bible is quite correct that once our basic needs are met, there is little relationship between the two. Mothers in the third world cannot be happy when their children do not have the basics of life. But there may actually be an inverse relationship between spirit and America's enormous and increasing wealth. Consider these statistics. The Economist magazine recently reported that on average, Americans enjoy seven times as much purchasing power as they did at the beginning of the last century. Yet sociologists tell us that our children today are more than ten times as likely to suffer depression than those born a hundred years ago. Sociologists say depression is now an "epidemic" in America.

More generally, since the early sixties, the University of Chicago has conducted a survey which simply asks if people are happy. My friend Dr. David Myers of Hope College super-imposes the results over a chart of American's disposable personal income. It graphically shows that while our incomes have doubled during the past forty years, the number of us who say we are "very happy" has actually declined from nearly 40% to 30%. It's possible that valuing money more than ideals has contributed to that decline. A major study of incoming college students says 75% now cite "being very well off financially" as "very important or essential" while only 40% cite "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" as equally important. When I entered college during the happier, more idealistic "flower-power" days of 1968, 82% valued the philosophy and only 40% valued the money. Our values seem to have almost exactly reversed from the "seek first the kingdom" ethic that contributed to the great wealth creation of recent decades. Ironically, some sociologists speculate that our depressed spirits may do considerable harm to the future economy.**

The Great Physician

As I've grown to know such statistics as very real people, I have also grown to know God as the Great Physician. Only this morning, I was visited by a hurting widow in her eighties. She is the mother-in-law of a minister in a neighboring city. Through sheer frugality and wise stewardship, her husband had left her a million dollar trust fund. It was invested with prudence, which is that spirit between fear and greed. But her son began to help her about a year ago. Perhaps as he struggles with depression, which can described as a hopeless outlook on the future, he decided she was going to need much higher returns. He and an accommodating broker traded the prudent investments that she had been most comfortable with for aggressive mutual funds that she did not understand. As of yesterday, the value of her trust was one-half of what it was a year ago.

The poor stewardship was not my primary concern. Through tears, this lovely and devout lady told me that she was ashamed of more important things. She said she had never worried before about money but now could think of little else. She also felt guilty that she wasn't trusting God to care for her despite the losses. She went on to say that relationships in the family had grown strained. She was even worried that her son might do harm to himself because of the losses. While I once asked God to teach me about the world, people and money, I more fully understand why Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes that such knowledge often brings great sorrow.

As I've seen a lot of similar stories lately, I guess I've been feeling a bit depressed myself. So in recent weeks, pastor and I have been sharing how much our professions have in common, which may be why Luther taught that all professions are ministries. Our modern world is so complex and is filled with so much pain. And as Luther taught, people can be such stinkers. We don't always heed the Great Physician's prescriptions for the abundant life. So we are often in need of his graceful and healing touch. That's hard for me to accept. Sherry and pastor can tell you that I've always been a fixer. As a teenager on the farm, I learned that if there was a problem, I was supposed to fix it. But I can't fix today's problems. So only last week, pastor reminded me that I may be able to plant seeds but God has to make them grow. It seems that God is in control, not Gary.

The Great Optometrist

For me, that's a different way of looking at things, which is why God is increasingly my Great Optometrist. Faith has long been about how we look at things, or what we call worldview. It's about the way we see reality. It's most especially about how we see what's important in life. So as I often do, I'd like to close with this passage from Peggy Noonan, who was President Reagan's favorite speech writer. I hope our college students might pay particular attention to her words as they look to their futures. Ms. Noonan wrote:

"Success is nice and I've had some and enjoyed it, but--so what? It isn't sufficient reason to get up in the morning. It's not good enough to live for. Success for me has been, essentially, getting invited to things I don't want to go to but like saying I went to. And one of the reasons for that is that I found I wasn't as drawn to and charmed by experience anymore--at least the kind of experience that is being at the party, the convention, in the hot-air balloon. All that now seemed mostly fine but basically overrated. Oddly enough, whenever I have been at the center of things--in the White House, at the party, in the studio--I would enjoy them and have a great time and notice things, but I would also think, and it wasn't only a detaching mechanism, a self-protecting way of not being there, I would also think: This is all an illusion. This is a lovely, tender illusion. We're all running around and being busy and doing important things but this has nothing to do with anything. Up there God and the angels are looking down and laughing, and not unkindly. They just find us touching, and dizzy."

To God be the glory for helping us to occasionally glimpse things from God's lofty perspective.

*At the request of several in the audience, this was written from brief notes and memory. It has undoubtedly been changed in places and expanded.

**One academic resource that describes the relationships between spirit and mental health in depth is, The Science of Optimism and Hope (Templeton Foundation Press, 2000. Phone 610.971.2670 if interested.)

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