One of his favourite passages, that also most frequently whisks through my brain is this: “it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven, than it is for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle.” All people can acknowledge that to be rich, a person almost always must benefit off cruelty, unfairness, and greed. The other six deadly sins are easier to translate to modern life — exorbitant horniness, six-day Minecraft binges, being mean to a boomer on Facebook instead of correcting his spelling and moving on. But now, in the hot, slick, juicy garbage mess of modernity, all of us are implicated in the rich man’s greed, simply to achieve stability.
To achieve my most basic needs, I am being in some sense “greedy”. I am squashing someone underneath my feet and I know I’m doing it. To have my place in a house, I force a less able person to the streets. My cheap coffee relies on somebody else’s suffering. My bin dived tomatoes rely on the waste of others. Almost all of us, regardless of our low financial positioning, are forced to participate in greed. The ideal aim of participation, at least for people of my strata, is to one day be financially comfortable. This also means I must be greedier than others, more callous, not give away my money and belongings to friends and family and those who need it, to get to comfort. This is not to mock people who desire comfort and stability, as I do too — to a suffocating degree. We all do. We have no ability to avoid greed, as the poor must be greedy in a capitalist system to survive. And the rich will be greedy because they can be. Greed is the fabric of our culture — to the point where we almost can’t see the most disgusting expressions of it. To see these expressions would implicate us. Maybe this is why Grimes’ less than abrupt turn to the dark side upset me. Publicly witnessing her half heartedly clinging to morality, while showing her fleshy underbelly of want, forces me to reckon with my own nasty entanglements with greed. The blushed hickeys that greed leaves over my body, when I walk past someone who needs my money more. The bruises on my shoulder as I try to squeeze through the eye of the needle. “I’ll get my law degree, and if I get rich I’ll give twenty bucks to every old mate who needs it,” I croon soothingly to myself, my rent burning in my pocket. I worry that if I ever do get financially comfortable, the eye of the needle will grow smaller and smaller, until I forget it’s there.
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Avaritia
When I went to Church, I never paid any attention, fidgeting and covertly annoying my siblings until I could leave. As an adult, I only believe in the divine after a four week Mi Goreng cleanse. Still, eerie psalms and gory passages strike me randomly. Solomon’s dismembered babies and the crimes done in the name of Yahweh plague my thoughts. Our Ugandan Parish Priest, Father Augustine, would awkwardly squeeze out analogies about homosexuality like “the parent… would never... feed his child… to the snake?,” with the effort of pushing out a dry turd.
