Greed - The Sin of Excessive Preoccupation
Excessive preoccupation
Greed is the sin of excessive preoccupation with money and the stuff money can get you or the things money can enable you to do.
Money and the things money afford us are external goods, which are real goods, so there is an appropriate place for money and for private property and the means to do things.
With greed we are speaking about an excessive preoccupation with money and the things money can buy (material things, travel, education, a certain level of safety and security and comfort – access to things not everyone has)
Greed is not the desire to be rich. Greed is the undue anxiety over money. Therefore, you can be rich or poor and suffer from greed since it is a preoccupation with money.
How do we measure our level of greed? Usually anxiety.
Our Lord connects anxiety to greed. Jesus said, “I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are we not worth much more than they are?”
If we are not content when we have food and clothing, if we find ourselves worried, typically we are worried about money or things money can buy. Again, our mortgage or our kids education are good things. What Jesus condemns is the anxious worry about them.
All of us struggle with the preoccupation, the anxiety that Jesus explicitly warns against.
Jesus said you cannot serve God and money.
The virtue of poverty conquers greed. Poverty does not mean that we all need to be financially poor. St Francis DeSales, in his book Introduction to the Devout Life, in the chapter on The Practice of Poverty for the Wealthy, gives four principles to avoid a preoccupation with money.
First, take care of what you have because it is not yours, it ultimately belongs to God. Furthermore, increase your wealth if the opportunity arises: DeSales says:
Be more concerned than unbelievers to put your possessions to better use and make them more fruitful. Are not gardeners of kings attentive and more diligent about cultivating and making beautiful the gardens in their charge than they are of their own? Why? Because they appreciate the fact that these gardens belong to the king, whom they wish to please. Our possessions are not our own; God has given them to us to cultivate and he wishes us to render them fruitful and useful by taking care of them. It is essential that we take more earnest care of our possessions than unbelievers do because we are working for God’s love, they are working only for love of themselves…Let us therefore be diligent in our care for our earthly goods, even to increase them if some legitimate opportunity arises and our situation calls for it.
Detach yourself from some portion of what you possess by giving it to the poor
But be careful that self-love does not deceive you; sometimes it counterfeits the love of God so well that we can easily be fooled by it. To prevent this from happening and to prevent the care of earthly goods from becoming greed, it is essential that you frequently practice real poverty while possessing the riches that God has given you. Always detach yourself from some portion of what you possess by giving it willingly to the poor. To give is to impoverish self by that amount.
Seek the company of the poor and serve them
I cannot admire enough the ardor with which St. Louis practiced this counsel. He frequently waited on the table of the poor and invited them to his own table. Sometimes he even ate the leftovers from their meals with an incomparable love. When he visited hospitals, he habitually went to those who had the most horrible illnesses: the ulcerated, the leprous…He took care of them…venerating in their person the Savior of the world.
Everyone occasionally lacks something.
Take these occasions to practice the virtue of poverty: be at ease, accept them willingly, endure them cheerfully.
When certain trials occur which impoverish you a little or a great deal such a storms, fires, floods, poor crops, thefts, lawsuits…remember that that is the right time to practice poverty and accept this impoverishment with serenity and patience. When our wealth is rooted in our heart and a storm or thief takes away a part of it, what complaints, what trouble, what impatience! But when we give these things only the care that God wants us to have for them, and we then lose them, we do not for all that lose our heads or our peace.