We all know what generosity is, but do we ever consider the important role it plays in our spiritual life? Without generosity, avarice (also known as greed or covetousness) can consume us with an excessive desire, or inordinate love, for wealth or material goods. Avarice is characterized by a willingness to make the accumulation of these things the center of our lives.

Although sometimes paired with one another, avarice and envy are not the same. Whereas envy involves sorrow at another’s good and a desire to detract from it, avarice is about acquiring more than we need. We will explore envy in a future column.

An unquenchable thirst

At the heart of avarice is a misdiagnosis of our fundamental need. Recall an image common in the literature and film of Western culture: the dragon in a cave guarding a mountain of treasure. The irony should be clear: Why is the dragon so preoccupied with protecting this treasure when he has absolutely no use for it? However, the dragon guarding his treasure speaks to our own tendency to misidentify our fundamental need: God. We identify a “lack” in our lives and attempt to fill it with the wrong things, or with material goods alone, without any reference to God. This misidentification is at the heart of avarice.

Once we make this move in our lives – that is, we look to fill a supposed “lack” on our own – we set in motion a vicious cycle. Avarice naturally tends to ever greater levels of expression. In other words, greed produces even more greed because we will never satisfy our need for material goods.

When nothing satisfies

Sacred Scripture witnesses to the truth that our true need, or our fundamental need, is not things. However, sin blinds us to this fact. Consequently, we vainly try to fill the emptiness in our hearts with more and more “stuff.” Like a jewel-hoarding dragon who grows increasingly ferocious at the approach of a suspected robber, we become more defensive when we detect a threat to our accumulated wealth. Despite the ultimate emptiness we discover in things, we become more intent on grasping and clinging to our precious jewels at all costs. The disorder of sin is thereby brought into full relief as the creature is fully substituted for the creator.

Creatures, however, never can satiate the thirst of a soul made for eternity with God. To root out the vice of avarice, therefore, we have to replace the mindset of lack with one of abundance – of overflowing. Recognizing how much we have and giving thanks to God for his goodness to us, we become capable of practicing the virtue which will keep our pernicious avarice at bay: generosity.

“He emptied himself”

If we wish to embrace an attitude of generosity, we should look to Jesus Christ who teaches us by the witness of his life. In short, we must imitate Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:6-8)

To re-establish order in our lives, we must turn from the disordered self and its attitude of self-reliance and adopt the attitude of Christ. When we are rich in the spirit of the disordered self, we will forever be blinded to our one true need: God. The life of the disordered self leaves one constantly grasping for that which can never satisfy.

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving become tremendous opportunities to order our lives according to our fundamental need. Praying for others, fasting and feeding the hungry, and generously giving of our resources are invitations into a more complete trust in God, who instructed us: “So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ … Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.” (Mt. 6:31-33)

THE WEIGHT OF GREED

In his Divine Comedy, Dante makes a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven with the poet Virgil as his guide. Ingeniously, in Dante’s imaginative presentation of Hell, the punishment always fits the crime. Thus, to his dismay, the greedy spend eternity rolling heavy weights in circles. Their preoccupation with material wealth during their earthly lives was a “weight” that prevented them from soaring to heaven at the time of their death. Their fists are forever clenched as a reminder of their “grasping” behavior and they move in circles to reveal the futility of their pursuits. “All the gold there is beneath the moon,” Virgil tells Dante, “...would not suffice to give a moment’s rest to one poor weary soul.”

Contrast the symbolic “weightiness” of greed in Dante’s poem to the “lightness” experienced by the saints who gave generously and spent their lives for God and others. We see, in so many saints, a “lightness” of spirit, a profound joy, which comes with seeking our happiness in God and not in created things.