And you ask me what I want this year,

And I try to make this kind and clear:

Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days.

‘Cause I don’t need boxes wrapped in strings,

And designer love and empty things,

Just a chance that maybe we’ll find better days.

Goo Goo Dolls

 

[Dear Reader: This is the fifth in a series on the vices as the Desert Fathers understood them. If you haven’t already read them, please begin the series with parts one and two first. The first two vices, gluttony and lust, were the subjects of the most recent Friday Blahgs.]

The day after Thanksgiving is an odd mashup of cultural priorities. On the one hand, we have the official start of the Christmas shopping season and everything that goes with it, an increasingly unrestrained orgy of consumerism of such economic impact that it led President Franklin Roosevelt to try to increase consumer spending during the Great Depression by moving Thanksgiving up a week. That resulted in a couple of years of confusion, with half the country celebrating Thanksgiving on the final (not fourth, as today) Thursday in November a week after the other half had eaten their turkey on “Franksgiving.”

On the other hand, we have the predictable calls from many Evangelicals to “keep Christ in Christmas” and to oppose, often caustically and gracelessly, any drift towards “Happy Holidays” or other generic seasonal greetings. From the silly (though admittedly often-overblown) controversy over Starbucks cups to the periodic snarky boycott threats targeting retailers who do not use “Merry Christmas” in their advertising, I often wonder exactly why we’re fighting so hard to attach the name of Christ to materialistic macroeconomic strategies that seem, at best, only loosely related to the virtues of the holiday (“holy day”) in question.

And speaking of Black Friday: I have done my share of day-after-Thanksgiving shopping and, in a different season of my life, used to think it was kind of a kick. There was something kind of fun, almost like being at a sporting event where the fans get to participate in the game, about being part of the crowd at Target at Oh-Dark-Thirty, fighting off the effects of the tryptophan and working the Christmas shopping strategy with fellow family members. But over time I have soured on the whole thing. Maybe I am letting the Walmart in Lebanon, Oregon cloud my judgment too much and I know I should never do that, but I’ve just seen too much. Too much anger, too much running over small kids and old ladies, too many overworked store employees berated over things beyond their control, too many near-fistfights over the last item on the pallet, to take much joy in this anymore.

Most things are cyclical and maybe I’ll find a way to enjoy Black Friday again. But for now, the degree to which I might be willing to twist my soul out of shape to save 20% on this year’s must-have Christmas presents for my kids—and the anger I feel welling up towards others who do the same–frightens and depresses me.

 

Invasion

The third of the vices in the Institutes of John Cassian is avarice, a word not in common use today except among poets and wordsmiths. But the concept is straightforward; avarice, Cassian explains, is that vice “which we may call the love of money” (VIII.1). While not precisely the same thing as greed, there is plenty of overlap between the two.

What makes avarice a uniquely difficult vice, according to Cassian, is how foreign it is to the way God created us. The other vices have their origin in a legitimate human faculty; our bodies require food to survive, and they reproduce by means of sexual intimacy. This is by God’s design, and in his kindness and generosity he has even given us the capacity to enjoy these aspects of our being rather than them being robotic functions devoid of feeling or enjoyment. But these faculties, as we can easily see, are prone to misuse and abuse when we exercise them apart from God’s will and in violation of his design. And so vices such as gluttony or lust distort faculties which God has given to me for my benefit and cause me to misuse these gifts to great harm, both for me and for others.

Cassian describes avarice as something different than this. Rather than being a corruption of something innate and given by God for our benefit, avarice is external to us. There is no legitimate function for it in our nature; it is an invasion, rather than a distortion. The love of money, he insists, takes hold “without any antecedent natural impulse but by the decision of a corrupt and evil will alone” (VII.5). The good news is that because it is not a distortion of something inherent to my nature, it ought to be easier to identify and resist. The bad news is that, because avarice is unnatural, if allowed to take hold it will so distort my view of God, of self, and of reality as to defy any painless remedy. “This disease should not appear insignificant and contemptible to anyone. Just as it can be very easily rejected, so, if it possesses anyone, it lets him attain the means of health only with difficulty. For it is a catchall of the vices and a root of all evils, and it becomes the shoot of an inextricable wickedness. As the Apostle says: ‘Avarice’—that is, the love of money—‘is the root of all evils’” (VII.6).

The danger posed by avarice is the reason the monks took vows of poverty. Better for a monk not to possess any more than the barest necessities for life, they reasoned, than to try to balance possessions with virtue and fail, “stoking the fire of covetousness that he believes will be extinguished the more he acquires” (VII.10).

The ongoing struggle for me with this stuff (which I hope you can benefit from as I wrestle through it) is translating it into principles that I can live out as someone whose renunciation is a life of marriage and ministry rather than of monasticism. The reality-bending power of materialism is not lost on me. The most extreme example of it that I have experienced came over twenty years ago when I was working in the credit department of a major national retailer.

The reality is that “stuff” can never satisfy; it can never hope to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart. Whatever satisfaction I may derive is incomplete, and so I go looking for more, more, still more, always more. The moment I seek satisfaction in anything less than God, I cast myself into the slavery of idols.

One day I was faced with a woman who had maxed out a credit card and a major-purchase account with my company and whose husband had also done likewise, but now she had found a living room set that she absolutely had to have. I processed an application to raise one of her lines of credit, and upon running its actuarial algorithms my computer burst into laughter. When I gave my customer the bad news that she could not make her purchase on store credit, she literally burst into tears and mumbled something about seeing if her sister-in-law would be willing to open an account for her so she could still buy the furniture. (I’m pretty sure that was the day I decided this line of work was not what I wanted my life to stand for.)

Her example was uniquely sad, but I can’t say it is unrepresentative. On a much smaller scale of self-delusion and self-destruction, I have to admit to occasions when I allowed material possessions to have far too much power over my emotions and judgment.

 

Distortion

The Desert Fathers were not immune to this stuff, and they knew it. Cassian’s extended description of what happened to monks who left themselves vulnerable to avarice is a study in psychological horror: a downward spiral into worry, deception, and rage which could not help but negatively impact everyone in the community. And it always began with some kind of self-justification which argued (rhetorically and literally) that the monk’s avaricious actions were reasonable and ought to be accepted.

In the community of monks who had taken vows of poverty, the self-justification usually took one of two forms. One was worry that certain needs might not be met now or in the future, and so some money earned from the sale of baskets or the harvest of the brothers’ garden ought to be kept back. The other, most common among brothers who had given up considerable financial resources to enter the monastery, was the insistence that retaining control over some small portion of their former estate allowed them to serve as a benefactor for those in need. Either motivation led to one of three forms of covetousness: The desire to take hold of something the monk had never had, to keep something that should be renounced, or to re-acquire something that had previously been given up. The self-justification required the twisting of Scripture: “They do not adjust their own lives and ways to the meaning of Scripture; instead they adapt the power of Scripture to their own wanton desires by looking to harmonize it with their own opinions.

Once covetousness in any form had taken hold, the same self-justification that led a monk to violate his vow of poverty would lead him to violate other commitments as well. Whatever reasoning a monk used to keep money in secret was by definition a violation of the vow of obedience; it demonstrated a lack of trust in his abba and undermined the virtues of humility, love, and obedience upon which the community was both built and for which it strove. The possession of money one had foresworn could not help by damage the monk’s conscience, leading him to “serpentine entanglements” in an effort to both increase his hoard and conceal it. Paranoia at discovery, anger when plans went awry, and lapses in judgment were clear signals of the process that was underway. “His faith disappears whenever there glitters some hope of gain. For its sake he does not shudder to commit a crime of lying or perjury or theft, nor to break faith, nor to be filled with the guilty wrath of fury” (VII.7.4-5)

Inevitably such a monk had nothing left in common with the community of brothers in which he lived. And so the self-justification which led him to violate the vows by which he entered the coenobium would drive him to seek separation from it. And Cassian takes pains to note that such a monk was never content to simply leave, but through intrigue and agitation always sought to undermine the faith and commitment of as many brothers as possible. The discord, which started with one monk doing what he promised not to do by keeping for himself even a small sum of money, would eventually threaten to tear an entire community apart.

 

Contentment

For Cassian, avarice was such a pernicious vice that being overcome by it was utterly ruinous even though vanquishing it deserved no particular praise. The desire for material possessions was a consuming passion that destroyed a person’s ability to live in faith, to use sound reason, and to defend against other vices. “It is impossible for a person who has been overcome by the desire for a small sum of money and who has planted its root in his heart not to set ablaze at once by the fire of a still greater desire” (VII.21).

A potential remedy to avarice is generosity, a virtue demonstrated wonderfully (though, I would argue, incompletely) in an anecdote I heard recently about Frank Sinatra. According to comedian Tom Dreesen, friend of and longtime warm-up act for Sinatra, you had to be careful what you said around Frank. If you complimented Old Blue Eyes on his watch or a piece of art, he just might give it to you. One time after Sinatra had taken off a pair of $2000 cufflinks and given them to a fan who had commented on them, Dreesen asked him what was wrong with his head. “If you possess something but can’t give it away, then you don’t possess it,” Sinatra replied.

“It possesses you.”

Generosity is necessary and can bring many blessings, but beware: It can still be a source of pride rather than humility. People can exercise generosity for selfish reasons. Possibly with this in mind, Cassian argues that the true opposing virtue to the vice of avarice is actually contentment. A person can be selfishly generous, and can also be embittered in voluntary poverty. In both cases a poisoned heart is camouflaged by a veneer of virtue. Cassian notes that “it is not so much the result of avarice that must be avoided as it is the disposition toward it that must be uprooted, since it is profitless not to have money if the desire to possess it exists in us” (VII.21)

And this is the hard part: Worrying less about my actions and focusing instead on getting my heart right. Contentment is ultimately an internal matter: What I think about, what I feel, what I want. From Cassian’s description, it is hard enough to renounce possessions and live in contentment within the coenobium. But I think it is harder still for those of us in the world, who have a far more complex task in balancing needs and wants. While I have not (and will not) renounce possessions but do not want to be enslaved by them, it is a challenging task to enjoy life—and stuff—without becoming drunk on the temporary pleasures my possessions bring. I’m not a monk, and I live with both feet in the real world. But the reality is that “stuff” can never satisfy; it can never hope to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart. Whatever satisfaction I may derive is incomplete, and so I go looking for more, more, still more, always more. The moment I seek satisfaction in anything less than God, I cast myself into the slavery of idols (Colossians 3:5).

“It is profitless not to have money if the desire to possess it exists in us.”

John Cassian

As with lust, however, most powerful to me is Cassian’s treatment of the heart rather than the behavior. The goal is not to have nothing; the goal is to want nothing. For the monks poverty, like fasting, is a means of pursuing contentment, not an end unto itself. Having nothing would merely leave me embittered unless my heart embraces contentment; if I do not, we are easy prey for Cassian’s three forms of covetousness. To live in the world and still retain possessions requires a different (and in some ways, I think, more difficult) path than renunciation: I must be prepared to renounce anything I possess on a moment’s notice.

I can’t even begin to articulate a formula on how that would work, other than to find no undue pleasure or sense of identity in anything I have the good fortune to possess. Cassian insists that “without a doubt, we shall never be allowed to accomplish this…unless the virtue of patience, which has nothing else than humility as its source, is first firmly and solidly founded in us” (VII.31). But this very season, in which we remember and celebrate Jesus Christ laying aside his rights as God, taking on human nature, living—and dying—as a servant, humbly obedient to the Father’s will (Philippians 2:5-8), seems to be the perfect time to contemplate how to attain contentment through patience grounded in humility.

Next Blahg, I guarantee controversy as we look at anger. (Sneak peek: I lack the capacity to exercise righteous anger…and I’m not alone.)

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