Break a coin this Christmas
It’s funny. Every year I have gotten these gold chocolate coins. I remember tearing through the bag growing up – it was chocolate and baby oranges.
Well I was sitting here at my desk and I have always hated eating these things because they are so hard to get out of the foil! I mean you sit there and you look at it and you start peeling around the edges and you finally get one half of the foil off. Then you sit there trying to dig your nails around the foil embedded in the side and it takes like 3 minutes just to get the foil off…
Meanwhile your hands have chocolate on them and you really wonder why someone would bother making these in the first place.
And so I was sitting here and I realized that it’s chocolate. You can break it in half inside the foil and eat it in three seconds. Sure it looks like a coin, and maybe in my head, it was supposed to act like a coin. You can’t break a dime in half. And even if you could, it wouldn’t be good for anything.
This is the curious psychology behind cognitive ruts – we know something is supposed to be a certain way because of the similarities it has to other things. If I break the coin because I see that it really is chocolate, I get all of the benefits of the chocolate (which are real) and don’t lose any of the benefits of it being a coin – because it never was a coin in the first place!
So now as about $2.75 in chocolate coins kicks in, it is a surprising revelation that if a coin is not a coin, there’s no use treating it like one. Even if it tries to be a coin, even if it is dressed up like a coin. The world does not always function in a way that matches its appearance.
This is something that you notice when you go shopping for clothing in stores. I annoy salespeople sometimes because when I go to a store to buy clothes I feel everything with my hands. I almost don’t even care about how it looks. If I am going to have something on my skin all day long it better feel fantastic. Lots of times I am disappointed by Nordstroms and Old Navy rocks my world – the cost is not important to the genre of clothing for designers. I don’t really understand this, but I guess that’s what happens when you divorce fashion from style.
Fashion is how something is made – style is how it is worn. There are a lot of forces that want us to view style as more important than fashion – that how something is worn is far better than how something is made. There are few things in the world that this affects more than electronics and clothing. I wish it were true that style and fashion always go hand in hand – but style is a concept – it is free, and it can be faked. Fashion is all about the nuts and bolts – how something is made.
When God created people, he ‘fashioned’ them – he molded them from material that he had woven together out of nothing. He didn’t ‘style’ the dirt to make it look like a person – he created a minature version of himself. Only fashion has integrity – only the materials used to fashion a product will prolong a product and make it strong.
When he was asked about taxes, Christ responded – “Who’s image is on this coin?” The answer, of course, was ceaser. “Give ceaser what belongs to ceaser – give to God what is God’s.” Christ makes a few logical jumps but follow his thinking here:
Coins have the image of Ceaser – they are value assigned by ceaser and they function for Ceaser – they are the currency of Ceaser’s world.
Human beings – people – have imprinted on themselve the image of God. Their value is assigned to them according to the image of God that they possess – their life. The life that we have flowing through our blood – the air we breathe – this is the currency of God’s world. All living things have value, but humanity has the highest value because it is stamped with imago dei.
So Christ says, in one pithy sentence, Ceaser’s coin are value according to style – and they are value assigned according to what someone thinks – a public philosophy. Our humanity is fashioned to look and work like its divine prototype – it is in the fabric of our cells to promote life in ourselves and in the world around us.
Granted there are things that distort this procreative sense to being defensive – but against what? You can tell a painter she’s no good at painting and yet if it is what she is made of she’ll paint anyway.
Sometimes it is hard for us to accept that people are all created in the image of God. It is difficult for us to look at that chocolate coin and say – this isn’t really a coin. It really is chocolate like chocolate that’s in any other shape. Maybe we say, that person is so rich, they cannot be poor. Or vice versa. Or we say, that person is evil, they cannot be good. Or vice versa.
Peeling back the shells takes a lot of time. As Christians we are challenged from the outset to accept that every person, despite how they look on the outside, is not only made in the image of God, but possesses the likeness – the functionality – of God.
This is the thought behind the scripture that says, “If you offer a cup of water to a prophet because he is a prophet – you will receive a prophet’s reward.” The benefit we receive from circumstances in life are directly related to the approach we take with them.
Our expectations of a gift can spoil a gift, hurt the giver and invalidate the gift’s function. This goes beyond positive mental attitude… This is about defining your world in a way that enables you to live life to the fullest and embrace what each moment has to offer.
I guess it feels like a worthy challenge this year to look at what things are truly made of and not what they appear to be – as a matter of respect, of awe – and in the case of chocolate at least – of delight! Everyone needs to feel the fabric of a situation and not judge its value based on a remote, limited or contrived scheme.
A good farmer gets down and picks up dirt with his hands and crumbles it between his fingers to see if it is the right consistency for the type of crop he has planned. This is what it means to “get your hands dirty” and it is the only way to judge the true character of any person or situation.
In some cases it may be the only way to unlock the true potential of what you encounter in life.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny
Excellent essay, well-written, ironic, meaningful, even Caesar would like it (I think).
— Romanós 671 days ago #