The Spirit Tax
Tikkun Magazine, February 1998

The other night my French fiancée Katrine and I had dinner with our Swiss friend Jeannette, who was just back from a month in Mexico–not the sandy beaches and discos of Acapulco, but the dense jungles and livestock-loaded buses of San Cristobal De Las Cases in Chiapas.

"The most amazing thing to me," Jeannette said softly in her halting, German-accented English, "were the altars I saw everywhere. Even in the poorest villages, where the children run barefoot in the cold while their parents sit trying to sell a dozen oranges, there was always an altar overflowing with flowers, clothing, little rugs, food. The clothes they need to wear; the food they need to eat–they give it all to the gods."

Jeannette swallowed a bite of grilled salmon. "In Switzerland we wouldn’t do that. And in Switzerland, the people don’t look as happy as they did in these little Mexican villages."

"Not in France either," Katrine agreed. She talked about the temple offerings she’d seen on a trip to India. "People brought food, cloth, candles, whatever bits of things they could find. Their peaceful faces showed me they were made content by these offerings and by their frequent visits to the temple.

"Their material poverty didn’t seem to affect their souls. On the contrary, their souls seemed full. They had something I really wanted."

As Westerners (of many nations, apparently) are wont to do, the three of us rhapsodized enviously about the spiritual wealth of materially impoverished indigenous peoples. And then it occurred to me that it’s not just Mayans and Indian peasants who take food off their tables to feed their souls. It happens everywhere in the world, every day of the week. In Switzerland. In France. Even in the otherwise extremely dis-United States.

There’s a Baptist church across the street from my house. Every Sunday morning I watch dozens of African-American grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, children, and grandchildren filing through its doors dressed in their Sunday best: clothes and hair neatly pressed, shoes shining, faces scrubbed and solemn.

I’ve spent a few Sunday mornings in a church like that, so I know that those folks–many of them on fixed, subsistence incomes–will empty their purses and pockets as the collection plates are passed through the pews. I know that if a church family’s house should burn, or if the church choir’s gowns need replacing, or the church’s softball team needs bus fare to an out-of-state tournament, the church members will dig into their pockets deeper still. And even if the insurance money comes through, the choir sings out of tune, or the team loses horribly, those generous parishioners will still feel their money was well spent.

Twenty years ago, my husband and I were a member of a Marxist-Leninist cell group pledged to overthrow the government. The organization’s overhead was paid by the tithing of twenty percent of each member’s income. My husband and I were making good money, working mandatory overtime in unionized factories, and we had neither the time nor the inclination to blow our checks on nights out on the town or big-screen TVs. So it didn’t really cramp our style to hand over what eventually added up to half the price of a house in the working class neighborhood where we were paying $210 a month rent. There were many things we questioned about our organization during those years, but handing over every fifth paycheck to keep it running wasn’t one of them. We wanted to raise our children in a socialist society, and we were willing to pay for the chance–however farfetched it might have seemed, even then.

More recently I’ve been working for ‘socially responsible’ companies, where many employees believe they’re underpaid relative to their mainstream counterparts. "It’s a trade-off," I’ve heard executives and assemblers say. "I earn less, but I don’t have to leave my values at the door. That’s worth a few thousand dollars a year to me."

Every day of the week, everywhere in the world, people who have very little else in common share this one experience, at least: we put a price on our own spiritual sustenance. We pay it. And–if we’ve made a good match between what sustains us and what we are sustaining–we get what we pay for.