Greed

Lewis starts with low-hanging fruit: greed. Why? Because greed corrupts the pleasures of God by seizing them in degrees, times, or manners outside of God’s design. We are all prone to wander into those wonderless sins.

Greed is a scaly beast. It stashes and hoards and sleeps on treasure. Greed is always hungry, always demanding more. Lewis calls this the demand of Encore. That fatal word encore knows no boundaries. It recognizes no proper times or rhythms. It always overeats. It loves to say “just one more.”

Unfortunately, almost all of our consumer society aims to allow us to demand encore in a voice that cannot be gainsaid. And the dragon fusses — and fusses loudly — if the demand is denied. Yet Lewis doubts that God ever fulfills this desire for encore. “How should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once” (35). Ironically, the demand for encore is too easily pleased! God wants to give more than we desire to get. How many present pleasures do we render rotten by demanding again and again what God once gave?

But greed does not always announce itself in fire and destruction. Perhaps the sneakiest form of greed comes when we use God’s gifts without enjoying them for what they are, giving no heed to what Lewis called “the quiddity” of things (Surprised by Joy, 244). When we indulge this form of greed, we force honey to school us about wisdom without ever actually tasting the honey-ness of honey (Proverbs 24:13–14). We order birds to soothe our anxiety without ever delighting in bird-ish beauty (Luke 12:24). We close the sun into the classroom of theology without ever basking in his sunny glory or his Eric-Liddell-like delight (Psalm 19:5). We should delight that things are before we seek to use them. As Chesterton once said, we must take fierce pleasure in things being themselves. Here there be pleasures the dragon never knows.

God is eternally, graciously, stunningly generous with his pleasures. The daily sunrise says so. And as Thomas Traherne — who was one of Lewis’s great inspirations — points out in his book Centuries, we are not yet nearly as happy as he means us to be. What an antidote to sticky fingers, the itch for encore, and the pragmatic misuse of God’s good gifts!

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