WHEN IT COMES TO ADVICE ABOUT YOUR MONEY, we might expect it to come from, say, your accountant. Or from some wealth manager with an unctuous, cheerful track record managing other peoples’ finances. Maybe you get advice from the guy you knew from college with that golden touch, or maybe it comes from books.
But here is my bet – that you don’t get advice on money from an ex-marine priest. Yet, by holy default, and the twists and turns of irony and destiny, Doug Lynam became the chosen one in his parish, charged with figuring out how to steer the Benedictines out of the deep financial shit they had gotten themselves into. (No scandal, just good old-fashioned poor management).
As it turns out, he did this uncomfortable task very well. He surprised himself. It became his new métier and, improbably, his life’s mission.
In the flesh, I was struck with Doug’s stark gift for being present. With his attention, perhaps I could get absolution for my past financial sins. Maybe best not to bring that up.
I can see how he would elicit truth, or at least honesty, from the people who seek his advice. And that advice is very practical, very specific, divorced from piety. Who knows, maybe planning your financial future can be a religious experience?
It’s not normal to get financial advice from someone who was a monk. Let’s talk about from whence you came.
I went to St. John’s College and loved the curriculum. The intellectual rigor fascinated me. I’ve always been a book person, so as a kid, I kind of hid in books all the time. Even the subjects I hated were the ones that gave me a certain discipline and fearlessness to be able to jump into any topic on any subject, including money, which I was completely ignorant of when I first entered the field.
You ended up in the Marines.
I sort of burned out on the headiness of it, living in my head all the time. In a way, you might think of St. John’s as sort of the Marine Corps for the mind. I felt there was an imbalance in my psyche. For me, the Marines were like a kind of cathartic experience, a grounding experience. Also, there’s trying to prove I was a manly man who could do manly things. Proving to my father that I was a real man.
But there was this nagging doubt — for all the love I had for the Marines, I wasn’t as confident in the political structure that was directing them. And so I thought, maybe this is not the best way I could serve my life in a higher calling.
And the higher calling led you to?
I swapped the Marines for the monastery.
Most people would say that’s a rather unusual decision. What did you think you were going to get when you went to the monastery?
In a way, it had all the best elements of the Marines without the downside. It had all the camaraderie; it had the structure and discipline that I craved. It had a higher calling, a purpose.
I was looking for the meaning of life.
That’s what St. John’s was calling me towards. Like, what’s it all about? I grew up in a really chaotic childhood.
A good friend of mine, Richard Rohr, talks about what he calls the wisdom pattern, which is order, disorder, and reorder. Those are the patterns we cycle through in our lives. My problem is that I grew up in disorder, so I missed the first step. I missed the order. I didn’t grow up and have a strong container, so I didn’t really know who I was. I didn’t have a good sense of identity. There was this hunger for order and that’s why St. John’s appealed in a way, because it’s so structured. As was the military and the monastery.
Also, I had a kind of a father wound, and was looking for validation within a community of men. I loved the Marines’ esprit de corps, the brotherhood, the community. The killing part, not so much. But it felt like the monastery had all the good parts of the military, with a quest for something transcendent, something that gives life meaning, direction, purpose.
Were you religious? Were you a Christian?
I would call myself a pantheist. Which means God is manifesting in all things, including Jesus. Jesus is the historical person who lived in Nazareth. What we call Christ, or Christ consciousness is different — it’s universal, you could call it Buddha, nature, or Ātman or Brahman or whatever you pick. The name is irrelevant.
So there you were in the monastery, and it had financial issues. And you, being the junior in the order, you found yourself responsible for addressing those issues.
Everyone in the community was very money-avoidant. Who takes a vow of poverty except the wise? Oh, also people with money issues.
I found that all of us had a lot of money trauma, every single person. So when you have a whole community of people who don’t want anything to do with money…
What was your own relationship with money, with your family?
We grew up pretty middle class, but my dad’s career really took off as we aged. He became the CEO of a company called Hilton Davis, a chemical manufacturing firm near Cincinnati. By the time I was in college, he was quite wealthy and living a pretty extravagant lifestyle. But the problem was that my parents were mad at each other. They divorced when I was about six and I would say they weaponized money. They each tried to make the other person pay for everything. They used their kids in a game of financial chicken.
It’s like, I’m not paying for this, you pay for it. Well, I’m not paying for it, you pay for it. And in the end, what they did is they both played poor. My mom would say, don’t ask me, your dad has all the money. And then I’d ask my dad and he’d say, don’t ask me, I gave all my money to your mom. But every time my parents would spend money, I could feel the tension, because they grew up poor. They grew up in very poor immigrant families. The end point was that I learned to hate money.
And my father lost it all over time and basically died broke, alone. That was pretty tragic. My mom’s doing fine, she managed to get to a point of stability for herself and kudos to her for that.
What do you conclude from that?
If you don’t face your money monsters, they’ll haunt you forever and ruin your life. If money is the tool of action in the world, if we don’t have a healthy relationship, we’re acting out our traumas through our money all the time.
What’s a healthy relationship, and what’s an unhealthy relationship?
A healthy relationship is somebody who understands what money is without thinking it’s all good or it’s all bad.
We live in a society that values it disproportionately. We are told by the scriptures that the poor are blessed. So between those two things, what should we be thinking of doing? We should be thinking about how we can use our money as a tool for love and service to heal a broken world.
How do you ethically build wealth in a sustainable way for you and your family, with integrity, with whatever your career or calling happens to be?
There’s what I call the four pillars of finance, which are earning, saving, investing, and giving. You have to master money on all four levels. And you have to love and serve a broken world, not just satisfy your egoistic cravings.
Why do people find it so hard to have a healthy relationship with money?
Because the important thing is, to have a healthy relationship with money, you’ve got to have a healthy relationship with yourself.
That means understanding what your spiritual path is to wholeness. This gets into Jungian psychology — that we all have a shadow side to our personality. There’s a darkness in every one of us, that if we’re not careful, it can overtake us and cause suffering. If we don’t transform our pain we’re destined to transmit it. We all have childhood trauma. We all have deep wounds in our psyche. If we don’t heal and transform that pain, we’ll inevitably transmit it to the people that we love most. Money is just a great way to transmit pain.
Look, God’s not going to work a miracle to solve a problem that you have the power to fix. Praying for financial relief doesn’t have a good track record. If prayer was going to solve our money problems, then we would’ve been billionaires.
Do people know what they’re getting into when they take you on as their money manager?
Our firm only does environmentally and socially responsible investing, that’s it. It’s a self-selecting group. So, yes, they know what they’re getting into when they come in the door. Does everybody want a deep-dive on their childhood traumas? No, of course not. It’s a great kind of add-on that you can bring at the right moment, the right time to push things in a healthier direction.
People would rather talk about sex than money any day of the week. I think because of all the judgment and shame and all the baggage that, culturally, we load on top of it. For many people, like your parents, it’s the measure of self-worth.
It’s an indoctrination that we get through osmosis. It’s around us all the time, the hyper-consumerism and hyper-capitalism. I mean, I’m a capitalist. I’m not trying to put it down. It’s the best of the bad options, really.
How do you address spiritual-moral-ethical issues in the concrete practice of helping people manage their money?
The tool that I found most helpful is the Enneagram. The hypothesis is that, there’s only so many ways you can design an ego structure. Think of it like designing a car. There are categories of cars, and within each category there’s infinite possibilities. It’s the same thing with an ego. There are nine core archetypal patterns – it goes deep into childhood developmental psychology. This is grounded in empirical science. It’s not woo-woo, it’s not astrology.
Once you notice the core structure of someone’s ego, the important thing is, what’s their greatest fear? And then you also know what their greatest hope is. And when you know what someone’s greatest fear is, that really helps you dial in the conversation around money. It’s a spiritual practice.
I view the Enneagram as the physics of consciousness. Just as there are physical rules of how the material world works, there’s real rules about how the spiritual dimension works. The Enneagram is an ecumenical tool that’s the foundation, the underlying structure of all world religions.
There’s an inner journey that we all, if we want to be our highest selves, need to take. There’s a turning inward, a self-reflection and a self-knowledge. What Socrates would say is the heart of the St. John’s curriculum is know thyself.
Well, this leads to the question, how are you managing your money?
[laughter] The same way I manage my client’s money. It’s no different.
I’m not perfect. I still make mistakes like we all do, and yet I am very happy with where my financial life is and where it’s going.
What gives you most pleasure these days?
Prolonged periods of contemplation and creativity.
As an entrepreneur who’s self-employed, I have a tremendous amount of flexibility and control over my schedule, which is the thing I value the most. It’s not the money, it’s working on the things that I find fascinating and captivating and interesting and creative and meaningful and connect me with the higher source; God, whatever you want to call it.
And I love Santa Fe. You can let your freak flag fly here. You can be weird and different and be a Marine, monk, money manager– all in one. The oddballs of the world are embraced here.
I would say that clearly my story is in the oddball category.