Enough

There is a tale that at a party given by a billionaire hedge fund manager, Kurt Vonnegut told his friend, Joseph Heller, that their host had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned in total from his wildly popular novel Catch-22. Heller is believed to have responded, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have – enough’.

Paul writes ‘For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains’ (1 Tim 6:10). That seems to me to be more relevant now than at any point in my lifetime with the extremes of greed driving ever more awful behaviour.

I imagine that we have all heard of players in professional sports being bribed to fix matches for corrupt betting syndicates. There were reports in the news last weekend of online platforms taking bets totalling hundreds of millions of pounds on the timing of the Iran war or whether particular Ukrainian towns will fall to the Russians. That takes the depths to which the greedy will sink to another obscenely hideous level.

Pope Leo is rightly ignoring those who are telling him to stay out of ‘politics’. If our faith has nothing to say about how we live and treat each other, then it has nothing to say. The prophets rightly railed against those who grind the faces of the poor into the dust – those who in human terms don’t have enough due to the greed of others.

We tend not to focus heavily on the Ten Commandments but ‘Thou shalt not covet’ seems especially appropriate for our age. How can we turn that round to a positive and to help remind ourselves that we have more than enough? I’ll turn to Paul again – ‘give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus’ (1 Thess 5:16).

Jeff Claxton