I was quite averse to attending my first gay pride parade when I moved to Seattle as a young queer. Mustering pride was not high on my to-do list. That was quickly remedied, initially by my very first Dykes on Bikes hard-on, but maybe more importantly, by the older woman who marched by with the sign, “I’m Catholic, and I Love My Gay Son.”

I haven’t found the reconciliation of church as community and queerness to be simple, wonderful, promising, or just the right fit. I’m open to it but tend to lean toward the belief that organized religion of the West inevitably follows the Animal Farm trajectory, eventually destined to a dogmatic bureaucracy (and far, far from a collective spirituality) much like its forefathers. I’d like to be wrong about that.

For the year following my out-coming, a friend and I saved up for a trip to Asia. She wanted to travel, and I wanted to get as far from home as possible. The trip was influential in a variety of ways. It was great practice for setting a short term financial goal (I realized how horrible I was at it). In addition, everywhere we ended up going, I was introduced to an incarnation of spirituality that was completely unfamiliar. We wandered into the largest Hindu festival in the world our first week into the trip, the festival of Thaipusam, which the Malaysian government announced just today as under consideration for declaration as a Malaysian national holiday. Following thousands of mostly ethnic Indians to the Batu Caves outside of Kuala Lumpur, we trudged up 172 steps into a cavern the size of a soccer field and watched preparations for “burdens” to be taken on as offerings to particular deities. These burdens included body piercings and fire-walking among other things.

A few weeks later, we found ourselves stranded on an Indonesian island during the final week of Ramadan; all transportation had ceased operating for the last few days of the fast and the ensuing Eid ul-Fitr celebration. A Muslim family invited us into their home to experience the holy time of year and to enjoy the traditional feast, and the family members often interrupted conversations to leave the room and pray. I had, at that time, never experienced this level of attention to a higher power in my limited-scope, Western Christian upbringing.

We later visited Buddhist temples in Bangkok, took a boat down the Ganges, spent an afternoon listening to Sikhs’ worship in a temple in Amritsar, and finally ended up in Dharamshala where the Dalai Lama and a substantial number of Tibetan refugees have lived in exile since the late 1950s. The place was loaded with followers who immediately began questioning us about attending an event in which the Dalai Lama would be receiving an audience. Three days later, we had permits and headed across town to his residence.

Appropriation of “exotic” culture to help remedy that hopeless, empty Christianity hollow, you might be asking? I’d like to think not. I didn’t come home and throw on multiple “acorn” necklaces and start reading the “Bhagavad-Gita,” not that there’s anything wrong with that. I did, however, realize that any possible higher power is a fractured one with thousands of names and thousands of various rituals attributed to it. One does not necessarily negate another, and surely, being queer didn’t necessitate any metaphorical level of hell-going.

Although organized religions like Christianity in the West clearly have an impact on personal finance as well as the economy at large (the first being a microcosm of the second), it’s sort of hard to track how spirituality affects things like personal finance in the United States, and, likewise, how personal finance and capitalism affect spirituality. There’s currently quite a bit of evidence indicating that Western notions of capitalism and empire are finally getting their tentacles entangled in even the most remote “Eastern” religions. Thaipusam as Malaysian national holiday, for example, has been recognized only as a reconciliatory gesture. The ethnic Indian workforce in Malaysia has reportedly been demonstrating in request of equal rights, claiming inequality in education and job access, while substantiating the lowest paid working class.

Rapidly advancing global power, China, announced in 2007 that it had the right to veto new lama selections made by Tibetan religious leaders. The Panchen Lama appointed in the 90’s has not been seen since 1995 and is believed to be in a Chinese prison, and according to the U.K.’s The Guardian, the Chinese government has similar plans in place for when the current Dalai Lama dies. With incoming news like the following, maybe personal finance will find itself dipping down to greet spirituality (Or vice versa. Wait, would that involve demise or transcendence?) in the United States:

“Much of their unhappiness is focused on China, where the U.S. trade deficit through the first 11 months of this year totals $237.5 billion, the highest annual imbalance ever recorded with a single country - with December still left to tally. The November deficit with China dipped slightly to $24 billion, but that was down from a record high of $25.9 billion set in October, when retailers were boosting orders for toys, games and video equipment to stock their shelves for Christmas…

Congress is considering bills that would clear the way for economic sanctions on China if it does not allow its currency to rise in value more rapidly against the U.S. dollar. American manufacturers contend the Chinese are manipulating their currency by keeping it undervalued by as much as 40 percent to gain price advantages against U.S. firms…

The growth in exports has been a major factor cushioning the blow to the economy from the slump in housing and a severe credit crunch. However, with oil pushing imports up sharply, analysts believe the help from trade in the final three months of last year will be shown to have been significantly smaller.”