hanging lake light

"The Christian vision is that the world is a temple, and buying and selling in the temple is the one thing that drove Jesus to anger and violence. It destroys inherent value and replaces it with an utterly false seeing: market value, the world of meritocracy and exchange rates.

It destroys the soul.

It had to be driven out or there would be no temple. There is no temple if you live merely in the world of buying and selling - the so-called bottom line. In that world, everything is weighed.

That kind of thinking is a dead end.

Preoccupation with exchange value and market value tends to blind us almost totally to inherent value. Prayer reconnects us with inherent value. Everything becomes priceless if it is sacred. And everything is sacred if the world is a temple."

- Richard Rohr, "Everything Belongs"