February - St. Augustine Catholic

eflection
sounds like such an old-fashioned word. I suspect that when
we hear it, it conjures up images of Scrooge-like misers sitting in
“Greed”
cold rooms and counting their gold coins one by one.
But greed is also a modern reality. We see it in the world around us, and we
live with it close to home.
Now and then we see blatant stories from parts
of the world where fabulously rich people with
millions they can never spend live side by side
with people who are going hungry.
But greed can be subtle. In its subtle forms we
can find it closer to home.
In our neighborhoods and households, greed
probably shows up more in attitudes than in great
wealth. For greed is, in part, an attitude. It looks at
possessions as more than the means to some human comfort and financial
security. Greed can also be seen as the unreasonable accumulation of money
and possessions as signs of our moral and personal superiority.
Most of us have learned to be careful about money. Everyone needs a certain
amount for safety and security. This is reasonable. What turns being careful
about money into greed is when the desire to possess goes beyond reason.
Greed is an unreasonable amassing of possessions.
Seen this way, greed becomes a kind of superstition. Superstition is the belief
that certain things have magical powers, such as the power to protect us from
harm. Greed can be superstitious because it says that my money will protect
me from harm and keep me safe.
Another form of greed is subtler. It takes comfort in simply having things –
not having things we need or will use, but just having them. Not only do we
have them; we are attached to them. The greed here, I suspect, is not in the
having. It is in the attachment.
A few years ago I was having dinner with a diplomat, the consul general of a
foreign country. We were talking about the differences in how people live in
her country and in the United States. She was describing how her countrymen
and women needed less to live on than Americans. They buy only what they
need, she said, because “they are not collectors.”
I guess I must have looked puzzled. So she explained: “I go into an
American’s house, and so many of you have collections.”
“Collections of what?” I asked.
“Well, plates, and china, and fancy glasses, and things like that. And as best I
can tell, they don’t seem to use them. They just collect them and look at them.”
Having just cleaned our china cabinet and washed a couple of dozen “fancy
glasses,” I realized what she meant. They were covered with dust inside and
out from years of nonuse. Later I wondered why we keep them. We don’t
really like them. Since they can’t go in the dishwasher and have to be washed
by hand, we never use them.
So why do we keep them? Probably because there are two dozen of them;
it’s a collection. So they just sit there. But we are also reluctant to let them go.
That reluctance may be a particular form of greed.
Many of us have more than we need or will ever use, things others might
benefit from. Yet we hang onto them.
Why?
Figure out the answer to that question and you might have a 21st-century
definition for that old-fashioned word “greed.”
Dominican Father O'Rourke is a senior fellow at Santa Fe Institute, Berkeley, Calif.
He wrote this article as part of the Faith Alive series for Catholic News Service.
An American
Form of Greed
By Father David K. O’Rourke, OP
32 St. Augustine Catholic February 2003