Anti-greed campaign

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
August 5, 2013

YES, why not? Why not launch an anti-greed campaign and keep it going like some lifelong maintenance mechanism in a world that has become rickety with all sorts of moral sicknesses, with greed among the prominent ones?

We just have to look around, and see greed and avarice and their many faces proliferating like anything, from the individual level to the farthest global ends.

Many people are trapped in an almost invincible grip of selfishness, pursuing nothing other than their own self-interest and throwing any consideration for the common good to the wind.

This is not to mention that many have forgotten to relate their earthly business to God, to consider it as a prayer and even an act of worship that is not only pleasing to God but also most beneficial to everybody else.

We have been reminded in the gospel about this aspect of our life. “Take care to guard against all greed,” Christ said, “for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possession.” (Lk 12,14) We have been warned against storing up treasure for oneself but not being rich in what matters to God.

Nowadays, many, in fact, do not even know the idea of common good. And if there is anything they do that would contribute one way or another to the common good, it’s by sheer coincidence that it happens. Any deliberate effort to do things for the common good is practically absent, if not openly avoided.

The world is drowning in a sea of materialism and consumerism, with the spiritual values and the supernatural destination of human life all but forgotten. It’s still working under an increasing infusion of deceptive economic tricks, but the illusion is also getting so increasingly untenable that things now are approaching breaking point.

It seems that we are being set up higher and higher in our materialistic and consumeristic ways for a deeper and more painful crash sooner or later. The signs are already there, and many of our leaders in politics, business, media and even in the church are hesitant to give the bad news. The predicament is practically left unattended.

Productivity is dropping, even in an accelerated rate in some places, mainly because without the support of the spiritual and supernatural elements of our life, people have no way but to tend to become lazy, and simply wanting to be comfortable, rich and continually entertained, and with narrow and shallow understanding of things.

In the corridors of power and influence, graft and corruption have practically become the SOP. Just read the papers, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The banking and financial sector continues to blow bubbles in the hope of stimulating productive economic activity. But they now seem to pop out soon after being launched.

We need to go back to God and seriously relate our earthly business affairs to him and to his plan and providence. We have to reassure ourselves that this is the proper way to do business, taking us away from the tendency to be swallowed up by the logic of the flesh and the world that cannot help but lead us to greed and its ilk.

God and economics are not two mutually exclusive realities. God’s eternal law includes the economic laws proper to us as image and likeness of his, and children of his.

At the moment, we seem to do economics by practically ignoring God, or even openly opposing his laws. The supreme law of charity is often considered as impractical and impracticable. In short, that it is inhuman, anti-business and all that.

We need to change that mindset. God and charity should be the be-all and end-all of our economic affairs. We just cannot stop at the level of profitability or practicality, making them the supreme goal of our businesses.

Without discarding them, we need to go beyond them and aim at what really is the goal for us – God and charity, which is the very essence of God and also the essence meant for us precisely because we are God’s image and likeness, and God’s children.

Doing business with God as the origin, way and end in no way harms our economic activities. On the contrary, it will broaden our perspective, sharpen our creativity, foster our productivity, and increase our capacity to tackle whatever challenges, burden or trials we may meet along the way.