Avoiding Avarice

Avarice—greed—is an addiction to material things, striving for material goods in ways that get in the way of your relationships.

 

In Dante’s Purgatory, those who are overly obsessed with wealth -- both those who sin to accumulate it and those who spend wealth carelessly -- lie face-down on the hard rock floor, weeping and praying, confessing their greed and crying out examples of generosity, a virtue that should have been theirs. 

 

In marriage, avarice can take many forms. One common example is spouses who put their time and energy into making money so that they can be good providers and give nice things to their spouses. There is nothing wrong with giving your spouse nice gifts and a fine home, but not if it is at the expense of companionship and other expressions of love and support. Avarice often cloaks itself as a virtue, the virtue of caring for the spouse and family.

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The reverse also occurs. There are spouses who push their husbands or wives to work harder so that they can enjoy the products of that labor. In doing so, they may deny the hardworking spouse the benefits of companionship and other expressions of love.

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But the real threat of avarice comes from substituting love of money and the things it can buy, for the love of persons.

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Mark once knew a hardworking guy who gave his wife a beautiful diamond pendant he picked out from an airline magazine while on a business trip. He was hurt and angry when his wife was less impressed by it than he thought she should be. To him, the pendant represented all the time and energy he poured into working to be able to buy things for her, and therefore she should appreciate it. In essence, he was saying that she should respond to the pendant as if he’d spent that same time and energy on her—taking walks, and talking about their hopes and dreams and fears.

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Karl Marx, the communist philosopher, used the term “commodity fetishism” to describe this tendency to invest goods with the regard we should have for people, or to make the gift stand for the relationships that giving a gift is meant to create. He recognized that when we over invest in material goods, we create disordered social relationships although, being a diehard atheist, he missed the point that this is also a disorder of the spirit.

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In fact, Marx’s observation was long predated by the Biblical proverb that “the love of money is the root of evil.” Again, it’s not money that’s the problem but the love of it—giving to wealth and possessions the energy and attention that should only be spent on people.

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Using possessions in a healthy way is often challenging. When our smart phones help us to stay in touch with our spouses and children, and to better coordinate schedules so that we can spend more time together amid our busy lives, the phones become tools for building and strengthening relationships. But the same possessions can just as easily come between husband and wife when one sits in silence beside the other, texting away, while the other watches funny videos on YouTube.

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When Dawna was in college, she had a poster on her wall that said, “The one who dies with the most toys, wins.” It is a saying that captures the creed of consumerism, a form of avarice that reduces the value of human persons to what we can buy and consume.

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The saddest thing about consumerism is that it blinds people to their blessings. Families making $40,000 a year look at those who make $80,000, and wonder how long they will have to struggle to get by. Rarely do they say, "Wow, we are doing better than 90 percent of the people in the entire world. We have a TV, a car, and a computer. We are truly blessed."

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And nowhere do we see the burden of possessions in a harsher light than when a couple chooses to end their marriage and divide up their worldly goods. It is hard not to wonder whether, if less emphasis had been placed on acquiring and maintaining possessions and more on working to love one another, the marriage might have lasted.  When our hearts are in the material world, it is difficult to be in a loving relationship.

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What do you withhold?

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And I would do anything for love… but I won’t do that.

                                                             Meatloaf

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Thinking about the love we squander on possessions and things leads us to the question of where we withhold love in our lives.

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Mark doesn’t think of himself as a material person, so he had a hard time seeing avarice as a problem in his family life. He thought he was pretty free of this sin. And then something happened that opened his eyes.

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First, you have to understand that Mark is a little bit of a coffee snob. He buys fresh dark roasted fair trade beans and grinds them himself. He makes all his coffee cup by cup using an espresso machine. It’s pretty much his only indulgence, so our family lets him get away with it.

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One year, every morning as he left for work, Mark would drive our daughter to her high school. And every morning she asked him to make her coffee before they left. At first he did, but then he noticed that she never finished her coffee. They would arrive at the high school and she would still have half a cup left and he would make her dump it in the parking lot so it wouldn’t spill in the car.

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So, he started saying no. Making her coffee was a waste of his time, and a waste of his coffee.

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Really? Was it? Each cup required two tablespoons of ground coffee. Working out the cost of the beans, each cup cost about 28 cents. If his daughter pours out half, she’s “wasted” 14 cents. Could Mark afford 14 cents a day, five days a week? Seventy cents per week? It took Mark five minutes to make her coffee, eight if he took the time to make it a cappuccino, which she really liked (but still didn’t finish).

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So, what if she didn’t drink it? It took a while for Mark to realize that she wasn’t just asking her father for coffee. She was asking him to love her by sharing with her something that was important to him. She was asking him to be generous and share a little part of his life and pleasures with her.

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Mark was treating his resources and labor as costs. He was viewing her undrunk coffee as “waste.”  He was thinking like an entrepreneur, not like a father.

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What do you withhold? Do you forbid the kids to sit in “your” chair? Do you “own” the remote?

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Based on current studies of marriages, we can make a prediction about one of the most crucial things you withhold from your spouse. Time. In modern society, time is a commodity—you get paid for the amount of time you labor.

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So, the next time you answer your spouse’s request with something like, “No, I can’t. I’d like to honey, but I really can’t afford to”--stop. Take a minute to actually work out the cost. How long will it take you and what will be the consequences of saying yes instead? And act accordingly.

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Discernment:

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1. If you’ve ever said—or even thought—“I work really hard for this family and nobody appreciates it” or “I’m not working this much for me, it’s all for you” you may have a problem with avarice.

2. Do you make a distinction between "needs" and "wants"? And if so, do you use it to make spending priorities? When real needs are not prioritized over desires, you may suffer from avarice. This is particularly true when your desires trump those of your spouse or children.

3. As your income increases, does your standard of living increase to match it?  Or do you save more, and have more wealth to share?

4. Is your family equally stable in times of abundance and times of scarcity?

5. Aside from normal time allotment for vacation, school, family and sleep, where is your free time usually invested: in enjoying your possessions, or in family growth?

6. Do opportunities for spiritual and material advancement ever conflict in your family? And if they do, how do you usually manage these conflicts?

7. Do you and your spouse openly discuss personal finances such as major purchases, job changes, saving plans, charitable giving, and so forth? Do you ever fight about spending?

8. Have you demonstrated the ability to “draw the line” between your job's demands on your time and your family life? Are you willing to pass up promotions, or even get a different job if it conflicts with your relationship with your spouse and your children?

9. Do you give substantial amounts of money to help others in a consistent way?

10. Do any of these questions frustrate or anger you? If so, you may have a problem with avarice.

 

Avarice’s Opposite: Generosity

 

You might think that the way out of avarice is to try to be non-materialistic, to stop desiring things altogether. But the Church fathers tell us that creature comforts and material possessions are a good thing. It is our excessive attachment to them that leads to sin. In Catholic doctrine, the real antidote for avarice is generosity.

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An admirer of the great German composer Johannes Brahms left him 1,000 pounds in his will. Upon learning about the bequest, Brahms wrote to a friend that he was more deeply moved by this act of generosity than by any honors or awards he had won. Then he informed his friend that since he did not need the money, he was "enjoying it in the most agreeable manner,” by taking pleasure in giving it away.

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Brahms was so touched by his admirer’s generosity that it inspired him to be generous, too. And one hopes that it stirred the same virtue among his beneficiaries. Generosity is a virtue that can go on mirroring itself until the end of time.

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The highest gift we can give to another is the gift of ourselves. Giving ourselves in this way epitomizes the virtue of generosity. For Christians, the perfect example of such “self-gifting” is God who creates the universe out of generosity, then makes a gift of Himself through the incarnation of Christ. In the sacrament of marriage, we are called to model that kind of self-giving love to our spouses.

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To the calculating mind, being generous seems to be costly. But to the generous heart, it is greed that seems exorbitant. Greed impoverishes our spirits, while generosity feeds our souls. In the economy of love that defines a marriage, nothing is more costly than greed, and nothing is more rewarding than self-giving. To ask, “What are the limits of generosity?” is tantamount to asking, "What are the limits of love?"

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At the end of our lives, our material possessions will neither comfort us, nor outlast us. The old aphorism states, “You can’t take it with you.” What is rarely stated, but should be, is the corollary: we can leave behind what we have given. The relationships we build through what we give will be there to comfort us when we die, and will live on in the hearts of those we loved abundantly, and who loved us in return.

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Practical Advice

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How do people get out of the mindset of avarice?

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1. Exert Stewardship. One of the biggest problems in marriage is the division of things: whose stuff is whose, and how are we using it? In Christian theology, it is understood that private property is a legitimate economic concept—but that private property is not primarily about ownership but stewardship. If we own land, or a business, our work is to ensure that even as it creates a living for us and our families, that the wealth it creates is used for the common good—in this case, the good of your family. Sharing is not just “nice”—it is essential. Take some time and look at where your family has drawn the rules of “his” and “hers” and “ours.” Does the division of family stuff make sense in terms of the greater good? Or does establishing the TV remote and easy chair as “for Dad only,” benefit one member of the household?

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2. Use Your Checkbook and Daily Planner as Spiritual Tools. How do you spend your money? How much do you spend on yourself? How much do you spend on others? How much of what you spend is on needs and how much is on indulgences? Your checkbook doesn’t just monitor your spending so you don’t get overdrawn; properly used it is a way to measure your selfishness and generosity.

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The Church teaches that we are the stewards of our wealth, not its owners. One of our great challenges is finding the balance between saving up treasure on earth by prudently putting some of our money away in savings for the future, and saving up treasure in heaven by using our money for the good of others here on earth.

 

Here’s another important question to ask yourself: How do you spend your time? Once you’ve put in the hours needed to get your work done, the rest of your time belongs to your spouse, to your children, and to the upkeep of the household. But people often treat time selfishly, “stealing” time or insisting that they have a right to leisure time by themselves. In fact, when you use your time exclusively for yourself, you are failing to live up to the mission of marriage.

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Imagine, instead, each moment of time alone you spend playing a video game or reading a book to be time gifted to you by your spouse. Receive the gift with good grace, and try to give as much as you get. But make sure you are spending more time together than apart!

       

A good way of exerting stewardship is to understand that your check book and your daily planner are spiritual tools. Like an examination of conscience, an examination of these tools can reveal where your marriage vocation is strong, and where more stewardship needs to be applied.

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3. Give More, Be Happier. One antidote to avarice is to give away the very things you most want to keep. All Christians are called to eradicating greed and living the spirit of poverty: give money to worthy causes and alleviate spiritual or material poverty on a regular basis. Almost all of us could be more generous financially. Many Christian families give ten percent of their income, regardless of whether they are wealthy, middle class or working class.

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There’s science behind this, as well as Apostolic teaching: According to psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton, people who spend more of their income on gifts for others and donations to charity, report that they are happier than people who spend their money on bills and themselves.  In a subsequent experiment, the researchers found that people given $5 or $20 bills were happier if they gave them away than if they spent them on themselves—and people were just as happy giving away the $5 as they were the $20. What’s more, scientists using MRI technology determined that giving to others stimulated the same areas of the brain that respond to pleasures like sex and chocolate.

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Prayer

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Loving God, help us to remember your self-giving love. Make us just and generous stewards of your gifts.  Help us to focus on what is necessary, so that we may give more of what we have to the poor.  Help us to look at what we need and free ourselves of the things we don’t need so we may follow you and grow in our commitment to each other.  Help us to recognize that the respect that comes from material wealth is a false respect, and that loving each other and loving you are the only things that matter.  In a world of material riches, where it seems everything is for sale, grant us the grace to find solace, generosity and joy in frugality and freedom from attachment to things.  Thank you for favoring us.  Amen.

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Resources:

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Dunn, Elizabeth W., Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton. "Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off." Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Kreeft, Peter. 1992. Back to Virtue.

Svoboda, Elizabeth. What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness. Current Books.