Photo Credit: www.ForestWander.com

 

Once a year I experience this reflexive anxiety as the government comes to collect its due from my wages, along with the rest of America. This year, yesterday was the announced deadline. I spent a good part of it wrestling with the mysteries of the tax code, the added perplexities of electronic tax preparation software invented to simplify matters, and my own resentful feelings about being asked to give more than I already have.

This year, it struck me for the first time how much this tax day twinge is like the pain I know that the Sunday offering plate can sometimes induce in church. But it’s like I say about the offering plate every Sunday from the pulpit: we don’t pass  the plate primarily because we need money to keep the lights on (but we do, of course, need your money). We enact this ritual of giving because we all need regular practice kicking our share into the common kitty. We all need practice making sacrifices, however modest, for the greater common good.  

We the people need practice because it is an unnatural habit and a rare underlying virtue. It is more natural to split your sandwich with a hungry friend next to you than to cast a substantial part of your lunch into an abyss based on someone’s shaky claim that there are hungry strangers it will reach.

The collection plate isn’t meant to be a burden. It’s a chance to say a prayer at the very moment you are taking action to help that prayer become reality. This is not a high-minded prescription alone, but with practice can offer more  visceral moral fulfillment. It’s the chance to expand our radius of empathy to include not only the friend two feet away but the fellow citizen three thousand miles away.

Is it reasonable to think of federal taxes in this way? Can paying taxes ever feel like that moment of warm fellowship when we divvy up that sandwich we made for ourselves? Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once opined, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

I know that because long before I was a preacher, my first job out of college was with the IRS. This quotation was chiseled over the door to my office building. Each day walking in, I thought about what it was that I was buying, and whether it was worth it. Holmes was, in the dissenting opinion from which that quote arises, lobbing a veiled threat: should we as citizens fail to endure the tax code, he thought society would fall into some dire Hobbesian chaos and would suffer in ways we can’t imagine.

The problem is few of us seem convinced of this possibility. If we were, we would seek the chance to buy more of this fine thing called civilization as a kind of personal insurance. Given the choice today, I worry most of us would simply opt out.

In the current political debate, the points of dispute often seem to revolve around who should be relieved from paying, suggesting that the money is going to do little good in government. I think the conversation, if it were genuine, about what we have the opportunity to buy would draw different interests and new lines of affiliation.

What would we actually choose to spend our money on if we were given the choice? If you ask people, I suspect they would want their money spent on stuff they actually use: roads, national parks, schools.  Most would buy healthcare when they need it. Some would put a good amount aside for national defence. Some would invest in science and medicine. Many would be moved to, and by, the common ground among us.

More important than the precise allocations, what we could gain in a more empowered debate about investment is the dignity of choice. The honor of arguing where money is allocated to do the most good is too often left in the hands of elected surrogates with more sensitivity to opportunity than honor.

If I were editing Holmes, I would have written that taxes are the small price we pay to become part of civilized society, to practice giving in faith toward that which we know is good for people we may or may not meet, knowing they too are worthy.

Taxes are a little less of a burden in this light. We ought to suspend the partisan debates which only serve to make us less. We ought to release the anxiety and resentment of being asked to feed the national plate. Taxes are the doorway to the cathedral of our great civil religion, the place where we have the most work yet to do. They extend our power in the world as we become more a part of it and as it comes to better reflect the best parts of us.