Marketing experts are hyperfocused on enticing us to buy expensive products we don’t necessarily need.
Look in your closet or in your garage. How much superfluous stuff are cluttering these spaces? Do you really hope to find true happiness or fulfillment in material things?
Related: Dialing Down Our Pride
Bishop Fulton Sheen describes this sin well: “Covetousness is an inordinate love of the things of this world. Such love becomes inordinate if one is not guided by a reasonable end, such as a suitable provision for one’s family or the future, or if one is too solicitous in amassing wealth or too parsimonious in dispensing it.”
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Here are several tips for all of us that I hope are helpful.
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1: “How blessed are the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of God is theirs.” (Matthew 5:3)
We are pilgrims on this earth journeying towards our true and eternal homeland in heaven; so we should be focusing on this goal without getting too attached and caught up in the material means. We spend so much time worrying about clothes and offering comfort to our bodies, but our spirit needs to be adorned as well, with a life of virtue and grace. This is where inner peace is found!
2: You cannot take it with you.
When we die, we cannot bring a U-Haul with us to heaven. It all stays here below.
St. John Paul II wisely reminds us, “But God said to him, Fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul; and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then? So it is when someone stores up treasures for himself instead of becoming rich in the sight of God.” (Luke 12: 20,21)
“She laughed when she told me the only thing that she had recently purchased was a vacuum.”
“The rich man, clinging to his immense fortune, is convinced that he will succeed in overcoming death, just as with money he had lorded it over everything and everyone. But however vast a sum he is prepared to offer, he cannot escape his ultimate destiny. Indeed, like all other men and women, rich and poor, wise and foolish alike, he is doomed to end in the grave, as happens likewise to the powerful, and he will have to leave behind on earth that gold so dear to him and those material possessions he so idolized” (St. John Paul II, General Audience, Oct. 20, 2004)
3: Make a clear distinction between “wants” and “needs.”
I recently received this note from a married woman who was deeply edified by her friend’s example: “A friend of mine kept a notebook by her phone and she wrote down anything she thought she wanted and dated the top of the page. Then she waited 10 days.
“Often, she said, when she looked back, she no longer needed what she had originally written. She laughed when she told me the only thing that she had recently purchased was a vacuum. THAT passed the 10-day test.”
4: God is impressed by generous giving, to the point where it truly hurts.
“In truth I tell you, this poor widow put in more than all who have contributed to the treasury, for they have all put in money they could spare, but she in her poverty has put in everything she possessed, all she had to live on.” (Mark 12: 33,34).
My oldest brother, Tom, has been happily married for 30 years now. He has five children and they have been tithing (giving 10 percent of their paychecks) since their wedding. He told me, “Mike, we made this decision because we knew the power of our attachment to money and material things, and tithing would not only keep us in check, but would give us an opportunity to help those in need. Besides, God can never be outdone in generosity … He has more than made up for our sacrifices and we have never been hurting financially.”
5: Have purity of intention.
If you are going to make a donation, ask yourself: Why am I doing this? To be recognized, noticed, esteemed, or praised for my generosity? Or am I doing it in a quiet and anonymous way, purely for the glory of God?
Fr. Michael Sliney, LC, is a Catholic priest who is the New York chaplain of the Lumen Institute, an association of business and cultural leaders.
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