Capitalist Tithing
Worship in a Market Economy
This Sunday, during service, I practiced what Buddhists call “Dana” — a free-will donation of cold hard cash to the Church where I was worshipping.
Afterwards, I practiced tithing in another way. Looking for a specific book, I eschewed ordering online in favor of going to my local bookstore.
This act of Worship (“worth”y reverence paid) directed itself to Prairie Lights, the Iowa City cornerstone where, over the years, I’ve heard dozens of famous writers in person. I always spend a little more when I’m here, and they often don’t have my desired title in stock. (Sometimes I order it there, sometimes I don’t.)
I like the idea of tithing in this manner. For a long while I used to think things like “the market corrects itself through price, when things become easier to buy in certain ways, that’s a benefit to consumers.” I would hear people bemoan the death of the Bookstore and I would think, “Well, that’s just progress.”
That’s a fair enough logic if you have a strictly market-based materialism. But my materialism is far more spiritual. A religious sensibility has redefined my perspective. Now, I see Prairie Lights as a sort of Higher Consciousness, an elevated Being that emerges out of the collaboration of multiple individual beings.
Who wouldn’t want to invest in that? It suddenly becomes a question of salvation (“salve, save” — “to deliver from some danger; rescue from peril, bring to safety," also "prevent the death of"). This becomes a matter of what was once called “Soul.”
I suggest to you that this designation can be fully “materialist” (“mater” — "origin, source, mother"). It’s only that the reductionist forms of Chicago-style Economic theory (in their noble attempts toward elegance) fail to represent fully. It could be that true Materialism is and ought to be Matriarchal, and not Patriarchal.
I’ll leave that to the Philosophers and Theorists. I, myself, am a poet, and I don’t aim to be much more.
My latest tithing involved buying a gift subscription to Psychopolitica for a friend. Proceeds go to Ukraine. This is Good. I’m contributing to a cause, a collective, an entity “Greater than Myself.”
I understand some folks balk at the old ideas of Religion, patriarchal as they’ve been. I’d like to reach out with an olive branch and plant seeds and work alongside others who are cultivating more collective eco-connections. John Vervaeke calls it “Religio” — religion lower-case — a shared sense of connection around a mythos.
I’m not here to push an agenda on anyone. Rather, I’m striving to worship the appropriate things in this world, the things which deserve respect and cultivation. My cult is a Garden. It’s yours, too — we share it, whether we want to or not. I’d rather want to.