16/11/2009

The issues of Money, Integrity and Wellbeing were recently debated at St Paul’s cathedral. I was struck a theme from the first debate – that financial ways of thinking have crept in to areas of life where they should not be and it is now difficult to express the value of anything except in monetary terms . Oscar Wilde first expressed this idea over a century ago in Lady Windermere’s fan where he describes a cynic as “someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing ”.

This monetary valuation pushes out other ways of valuing the world around us. The legal process of divorce can reduce marriage to a financial calculation, and pre-nuptial agreements can seemingly attempt to do that even before the vows are made. A focus on monetary rewards is said to have contributed to the financial crisis, and the drive for short term profits has changed the way business is done both here and overseas. However, we all know in our heart of hearts that an amount of money is not a real measure of our overall wellbeing, either as individuals or as a society .

How then should we value the people and things around us? God does not assess our worldly successes but on what we are like inside. He knows each one of us intimately: “ man looks on the outward appearance but the LORD looks on the heart. ” And he loves us deeply “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son ”.

When we try to assess what we really value, perhaps we should look to the quality of our relationship with God and with other people, recognising that they cannot be bought but depend on what we are like inside.