This month I invited St. John’s Circle of Beloved Intern, Kat Lewis, to share their thoughts and experiences regarding money.
At Circle of Beloved, young adults live together in an intentional Christian community that acknowledges and deepens kinship across many lines of difference. The fellows serve full time at non-profit sites serving the greater Twin Cities area. Some of the fellows work at AmeriCorps sites that work to close opportunity gaps in Minnesota while other fellows work directly for non-profit agencies in advocacy roles supporting programs that address issues of environmental justice, affordable housing, and food insecurity.
Instead of earning an income from their work, the fellows are provided housing and a stipend. I was curious to hear why Kat choose this path after college and wanted to share their inspiring story with all of you.
I remember going on walks at Grace Point, the church camp my grandparents started, so aware of the feeling that I stood on the edge of the universe while my grandparents talked theology to me.
My grandfather is an Episcopal priest, and both of my grandparents were active during the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. My father’s childhood was marked by my grandfather preaching that Jesus was a communist and my grandmother regularly receiving death threats from angry white supremacists. My grandmother organized with prominent Civil Rights leaders such as John Lewis and hid in the trunks of her friend’s cars to evade the police. She is a passionate voting rights activist and has served as the president of the ACLU Mississippi chapter.
To my grandparents, their faith is inseparable from their involvement with social justice. The interconnectedness of my grandparents’ passions skipped a generation, and I became the wild grandchild throwing myself into religion and activism. After I was arrested at a protest, my grandmother gleefully called me a jailbird and told me how proud of me she was—not many would expect this reaction from their grandparents upon being released from jail, but it certainly earned me the title of Favorite Grandchild. Of course, following this path did not lead to the same financial security my computer science or business major peers have. However, some things are too important to choose.
In the TV show Sort Of by Bilal Baig, the main character Sabi is a gender queer nanny who uses they/them pronouns. They have to choose between moving to Berlin for the adventure of a lifetime or staying at home to emotionally support the family they work for as the family goes through a crisis. Sabi’s sister says to them “let it not be a choice… some things are just too big to be choices.” For me, fighting for liberation is too big to be a choice, and so is my faith.
I remember sitting alone at church one fall Sunday my first year at Macalester. I had debilitating anxiety my first year of college and attending church by myself was often the only respite I had. In the middle of singing a hymn I now don’t remember; I felt a bolt of lightning crack over my head and down my spine. The lightning bolt was invisible to everyone else attending the service, but I felt it sit in my stomach and lift me off the ground. It felt like my whole body was taken over by this feeling, and it told me to be a priest, that this was my calling. Going to church, being a religious studies major, and working at faith-centered places were no longer choices—they became as important to me as clean water and oxygen.
During that same anxiety riddled semester, my friend showed me this quote from R. Buckminster Fuller:
You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to the highest advantage of others.
The radical and unconditional love God has for all of God’s creation keeps me grounded in my faith, and it energizes me to act boldly while seeking to dismantle intersecting systems of oppression. My grandparents are both beautiful and inspiring examples of success—their hopes and convictions took root in me to keep up the fight, and I hope I get the chance to pass it on to my grandchildren, too.
While I do not have much cash to spare while being a fellow with Circle of the Beloved and living on a modest monthly stipend, it is still imperative that I give what I can afford to support mutual aid networks and invest in the longevity of movements I believe in. Mutual aid is a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources, services, or funds for mutual benefit. When people participate in mutual aid, people take responsibility for caring for one another in the face of government failures and systemic oppression that leaves many marginalized people without. It is also a direct way for those with generational wealth to redistribute their resources to those who do not have the same privileges. It is not a one-way exchange, but a process of relationship building and community care.
What I can afford to give may not seem like much, but it could be the difference between someone being able to sleep peacefully in a hotel or suffering through a bitter Minnesota winter night outdoors. It could give a protester the extra cash they need to travel in order to appear in court, or help students afford effective masks as they risk being exposed to COVID-19 while attending school. Mutual aid encourages individuals to exact agency, by empowering them to ask their community for exactly what they need.
Mutual aid projects are what I see when I read the Bible, just as I feel the Holy Spirit moving through the crowd at protests in the Twin Cities. In The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers, she describes the beloved community in Acts:
…people from every walk of life and culture sharing their gifts so that no one had less or more than they needed. If you had more faith, you shared with those who had less. If you had more money, it went into the common pot so everyone had enough. If you had great knowledge, you should be teaching others. And you used your power to protect the most vulnerable. That unlikely body of Jesus’s followers prayed, ate, and sang together at home and in temple courts, filling the air with praise for God, sharing good news and love with their neighbors in a way that was so contagious and life-giving, others couldn’t wait to take up this countercultural, self-giving way for themselves.
Acts 2:42-47 & Spellers, 32-33
Reading Spellers’s description of the Acts community reminds me of my experiences in grassroots organizing in the Twin Cities. To participate in community organizing and mutual aid is an act of non-judgemental, compassionate love that recognizes the interdependency all human beings have in connection to one another. It is as much a spiritual commitment as it is a political and financial one. When grassroots organizations build coalitions with each other, we recognize that the vectors of oppression we struggle under are interconnected and our liberation is dependent upon one another. We work and struggle alongside each other, and give lovingly when called to do so.
Understanding and navigating our society’s financial systems as followers of Christ can be challenging. Maybe that is why Jesus talked about money and possessions more than prayer and faith. As with most spiritual practices, we gain strength when we share with and support each other. Please let me know if you are willing to write a post, offer resources, submit an article, or do an interview-you never know who needs to hear your story. -Sarah Dull, Executive Administrator
