“And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. He blessed Abram…and Abram gave him one-tenth of everything he had.”
Genesis 14:18,20

    What is so special about one tenth (a.k.a. a tithe)? Absolutely nothing, except that it is nine times smaller than nine tenths. God has no fetishes for numbers. It is true there are recurring patterns in nature, but the fact that there is immense diversity of things all around us exhibits the primary importance of reality is its substance rather than its apparent form. Distinct numbers and shapes are unique in nature—purity of abstraction is a rarity, not the norm of life. To the extent that mathematical abstraction undergirds our experience of the world, it is only immediate as such in being a manner of appearance rather than the substance of things. To the extent the world itself perhaps exhibits mathematical form outside our capacity to observe it as such, our rational understanding of things in nature obeying (or themselves being) mathematical form is not the substrate of their existence—to think on transcendentally real mathematical forms is not to substitute their intrinsic substance, it is to represent them for the purpose of our mind.

   Now that that is said, I can address how we should feel about the Christian tithe, and to do so as a generalized proxy for all charitable giving.

     If numbers do not have primary existence, if they are the form of things but not the things themselves, then being at most representations we have no good reason to give them our full concentration. Obsession over tallying one’s bank account, panicking over one’s GPA, evaluating your employees with some metric of company worth—all these things are mere suggestions to how we should frame our reality, but they do not have primary value in themselves. The love of money is a strong temptation not because we are greedy bastards but because numbers exist as pure patterns in the mind, and as such their proximity to our attention makes them easy to ascribe more worth than they are really worth. One’s guilt, fear, pride, excitation over amounts are primarily a personal experience, and do not have much tangible reality outside of their mental immediacy. When you die, so do your mental representations of quantitative worth detach from concrete things. You cannot take things into the grave by imagining their quantity. Money cannot guarantee a person happiness because it is a mere physical placeholder for mental representations of quantity.

     Now I can get after the purpose of a tithe. For one, the Christian church (or any church for that matter) does not by being religious make it intrinsically superior to other nonprofits. Churches should function as hubs for intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal transformation, i.e., for personal development, for socialization, for cultural development, and for service projects. There are better ways to decide where monetary worth should be placed than their mere attachment to a “holy” institution. Holiness is the quality of being different from destruction, not of something’s apparent glit and glam, material or spiritual, traditional or trendy.

     Giving money to church is an age-old tradition. At the minimum, it funds your local social institution. It also lets the church do more than the bare minimum, which includes connecting and caring for people inside and outside its community. Formality facilitates accomplishing such tasks. Think about what life would be like without civil infrastructure? Institutions allow us to do way more than we would be able to do without them.

     Of course, there are losses to institutionalization. There is an authenticity of connection that occurs when there is no preset structure to follow. The sense in which your collective goals as a group of people actually depend on you is dampened with formalities. People can be more apathetic about their church when they have a building, and even more so when the building is big. You lose more and more intimacy the bigger your institution gets.

     Yet the losses arising from formality do not make institutions the moral opposite of flat organization. Institutions are not the opposite of freedom. Rather, institutions are the natural product of informal freedoms seeking mutual satisfaction. When this germ is forgotten, the husk of formality is what remains. This can happen in an individual life as well. A person who commits to a hard-working and routine existence can risk losing the substance of life. But a person who commits to a freeform and openminded life can risk losing stability and the ability to make a real difference. Contemplation and action are not opposites, but are reformulations of one another. Pragmatists are luminaries in action, luminaries are pragmatists in abstraction. One is not superior to the other, each depend on each. As thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind (Kant, 1787), formality depends on meaning for fuel and meaning depends on formality for usefulness. Leaning one way or the other, you may make improvements in specific dimensions, but there are always tradeoffs in other dimensions. You have to count your losses one way or another: as lost marginal gains of not formalizing, or as lost intimacy in forgoing informality.

     I find the Jewish tradition of tithing to have some particularly beautiful aspects. It took a long time for me to come to terms with what it means to “give to God” in the first place. Many of these ideas compelled me at first, then fixated me, then settled down and relaxed me. I’m going to dance through them, move through them rather quickly. I’ll start with the Jewish tradition of sacrificing one’s firstfruits to God.

     At first, the notion of “give the firstfruits of all you own” struck me to mean that I must sacrifice all my most beloved possessions, to hate them as Jesus told me I must hate my father and mother to follow him. I, an Abraham, was to kill all my Isaacs, giving away or destroying everything I cherished for the reason I cherished them. This is what it means to truly follow God, I thought. I could not compromise, lest my soul never experience inner relief. Neither could I shrug off its meaning what it seemed to mean, because then I would be shrugging off all moral absolutes. I did not want to be haunted by a Holy Ghost. The problem is that this is really not far off from self-harm. To sac-ri-fice everything you own entails a sort of religious massochism. It does not look like a heavenly compassion. But then again, a Hallmark Christianity overstocked with grandma’s effeminate dove trinkets does not look like absolute moral integrity. What is one to do? Evangelist and Missonary preachers over the radio are telling us Americans we’re a bunch of greedy bitches and that we need to lay it all on the line right now. On the other hand, upper-middle class churches that take a subtler approach to finance usually shun ugly, dirty, schizophrenic homeless people; and when they don’t, these individuals are treated like they need to be fixed with money or food or clothing, thus their personhood is overlooked. Many a time, I have taken the advice of prosperous Christians and compulsivey given things to homeless people: water bottles, food, attention, prayer, etc. These things were often to good effect on the part of the other person, but I did them in slavery to religious idealism, saying prayers like, “I will surrender all to you God. I will totally and fully commit myself to your word. This time is the time. I will give up all my professional and personal goals and be a missionary.” Then I would go do something crazy and radical for Jesus. I couldn’t see my own ego in the process.

     It’s conventional among human beings to expect each other to fully live up to our shared social ideals. It’s also common, in religious circles especially, to not acknowledge those ideals as being invented by our fear of rejection. We take the imaginations of our fears for absolutes. In my case, I felt I must become a morally perfect Christian immediately and at all costs. The impulsively entranced singing of much contemporary Christian music only added to this problem. The heightened emotions of a song entangled the content of ideals with those soaring emotions. To follow Jesus became to have a holy high. Shaped by those transcendent moments, it became an implicit expectation for me that every action, feeling, thought, scripture reading time, conversation ought to be equally intense. Holiness was a fluorescent flood light. Acts of devotion were something to be flipped on or off to maximum intensity. Impulsive vows I made in guilt-ridden frenzies I had to obey, regardless if I didn’t like them, because God’s word is binding. Better not to vow than to vow and not do. This was the beginning of an unfurling of dogmatism.

     Before things got better, they got worse. The invisibly self-harming dogmatism led me to on many occasions to starve myself, fasting “for God” on sheer impulse, give things away willy nilly. If I couldn’t do things out of the blue, then was I really fully surrendered to Jesus? It reached the point where I had to physically hold myself from slamming my body into walls and hard objects because the tension was so great within me. It felt like demons were assailing me on all sides. That degree of intensity lasted for about half a year. The only possible escape from this torment had to be through the Bible, because I was allergic to anything else but God’s gold-leafed, leather-bound Word. In my desperation, scrambling through the scriptures for counsel, several passages appeared to me.

Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear.
Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.
Then I said, “Here I am; in the scroll of your book it is written of me.
I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is within my heart.“
Psalm 40:6-8

“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?“
He has shown you, O man, what is good; what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:6-8

Come to me, all you are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy (form-fitting) and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30

     Like opened windows, fresh air blew through these passages. Something deep was happening here. Expectations of performing up to ideals of religious sacrifice were somehow external, not fundamental to the human soul. God was not measuring me; God’s will for me was to operate according to the basic modes of human nature, notably those of how people converse and relate to one another in love. I was being called to intrinsic motivation. It was therefore not necessary to obey strong, idealistic moral compulsions. Even though those ideals did often attest of good things, being decontextualized from my personhood and the nature of my organic physiology, operating under them had terribly unnatural effects. It became clear to me that the “sin” I was avoiding was actually being produced through ideals in general, and that moral ideals were creating destruction in Christians just like someone’s life can be ruined by a cocaine addiction. The true motivational framework for becoming a wholesome person was to understand human nature and to leverage it toward preserving self, others, and world. The most morally right thing I could do was to detach myself completely from my old workaholic moralism.

     I learned a fundamental (though often abused) truth of Christianity: moral depravity is not overcome through reinforcing behavior under the moral instinct, but through translating the demands of moral standards as being easily satisfied by the modes of intuition. Intuition could lead me straight to the good far faster than the moral approach. I did not have to keep putting new wine into old wineskins. I could follow the Spirit, learning through time the wise ways of nature. I could listen for the deep voiceless voice of God speaking silently in all things. To follow God as a Christian blossomed from an industrial ashen stone into a rainbow-hued million-petalled flower embracing all humanity, all life, all things in the cosmos. Christ’s humanity as the image of the divine will became the preeminent standard for judging between moral behavioral frameworks. The personhood of Christ meant that all behavior—including one’s moral framework—is to be judged according to the substance of real life in its organic complexity. Christ’s humanness serves as an arrow shot infinitely out into the cosmos’ living deeps where God invisibly dwells. This is a deeply, deeply satisfying idea. I do not believe there is a single human being in all of history who, if given a means natural to them for understanding this, would hate it. Christ is desirable because he calls us not to Christianity, but to conserving the plurality and manifoldness of real living, which includes a diversity of worldviews and moral frameworks. To plane humanity according to a sterilizing Christianization is to kill Jesus.

      I could love what I loved, I did not have to give my things away any more. God was not in competition with me. I did not have to go genocidal on my beloved Isaacs because God affirmed what was in me the whole time. A cheetah was a cheetah, and the truest way a cheetah could live was as a cheetah. A cheetah only had to be a cheetah. About this time, I realized that the abstract ideals I was following were terribly difficult because they were, relatively speaking, infinities. It did not matter how good I was in practice, more was always the standard. It was like I had to be transmuted into a different substance, where my existence was equivalent with the ideals. But the ideals were abstractions, simplified representations of real life. The true moral way (which actually satisfies the goals of the idealistic mind) was not to become a recluse in the mountains of perfectionism, but to step out into the physical, corporeal, empirical world of plants, animals, dirt, cussing, laughter, and alcohol. This was far more desirable; I hated being sterile anyway.

     Even though everything with respect to infinity is zero, the infinite was not at war with me. In my seeking, I found the chief infinity among infinities leading me back to my deepest self, where I am nothing. The infinite was unlike me in my comparative nothingness, and as such there was nothing to do, no one to become, nothing to lose, nothing to add to God, nothing to subtract. The peace of the infinite glory was already graced to me, as deep cries out to deep. The span between me and the perfect was so great it was like an absence of comparison altogether, like a clear window through which my rational mental faculties could feel the deep life within the organic whole of all existence, where suddenly I was not nothing—I was a human—and the infinite was the empty abstraction. It was empty idea, I was substance. Then I, being finite, stood over the nothing like an infinite spirit, not as an idea but as a being: having hair, green eyes, affection for Baroque music, etc. As Christ was killed under the law and resurrected in the Spirit, my moral absolutism died as mere abstraction and my natural self was reborn in a world-encompassing love for all the diverse specifics that exist. Merged with the infinite in meaning, distinct in substance, I found the real purpose of sacrifice: kindness.

     So this brings us back to the tithe. Our world is full of suffering. Everything is being continually chipped away at, there is always a little rust eating at our plans and actions. We are always losing to ultimately irreversible entropic processes. Should we hold onto all we have, we deny the unavoidability of change and the certainty of our death. And should we contrariwise not sacrifice our sacrifice, should we not rest from our movements, we will never see the gift of life for what it is. What, then, is our purpose in life and death? At the end of the day, what are we to consider and spend our lives on? Some creatures are suffering more than others, and we can make a difference in that. We can help each other. Freed from a rational perfectionism, the wholeness and transience of reality being apparent, it becomes clear that any one person’s wellbeing is connected to the wellbeing of all creatures. As Abram gave a little bit to the Priest-King Melchizedek, we can choose to give our losses in life, to treat what is taken from us as little acts of love toward everything entropically nibbling at us. If we do not love change in its tragedy, we cannot love life in its bounty. It will be hard, and we need not enjoy pain, but it is possible, if we so desire to create a smile on someone else’s face, to make a difference in this fragile, precious world. If we do, we will even benefit ourselves. So let us give a portion to those in need, let us not gather our surplus, let us not be on-task at all times, let us rely on intuitive processes partly invisible to us, let us all be part-time mystics and part-time wretches. Let us dance in the cosmic jazz in that space beyond time, place, permanence, and decay. There, Life moves between the supreme light of lights and the great void, sinks down into that darkest of darknesses, and is reborn as a syncopation of rests.


April 5, 2020
San Luis Obispo