Thoughts on Greed (cross-over post from The Best of My Life)

A fellow blogger recently wrote of greed, a word I have been reflecting upon lately myself. She also generously allows readers to repost anything she writes. Her post follows here, in italics. My reaction to it follows. Sometimes I was so nervous thinking about the future of our children and grandchildren. Given this time, the natural damage so becomes. Thousands of paddy every year disappear. Thousands of hectares of forests turned into barren. Humans multiply, while the food supply is inadequate. Future generations will find so many challenges, due to our mistakes today. Indeed the earth is able to meet all human life who lived on this planet. But the earth will never be enough for a greedy! Unfortunately, human greed is not just one person. Eventually, rations for the next generation which they entrusted to us, have we robbed today. Conscious or not, we have become robbers our offspring. Stop the greed! I read this essay with great interest as I just recently read an essay by Pope Benedict XVI on the writer, Ambrose Autpert from the early centuries of the Catholic Church (8th Century). Ambrose wrote a treatise on the combat between the vices and the virtues. Benedict writes, "In this treatise, Autpert sets contempt for the world against greed . . . a contempt for the false vision of the world that is presented to us and suggested to us precisely by covetousness . . . It insinuates that 'having' is the supreme value of our being, of our life in the world . . . And thus it falsified the creation of the world and destroys the world." In this treatise, and in his follow-up treatise, Autpert confirms that "In the earth's soil various sharp thorns spring from different roots; in the human heart, on the other hand, the stings of all the vices sprout from a single root, greed." When I first read Holy Father's essay on Autpert, I was deeply moved by this section on greed. It expanded the meaning of greed for me to apply it to some specific aspects of my own life and particular behaviors. And truly, on a global basis, there can be no doubt that if we are poor stewards of our earth, we don't need to look very far to discover the root - GREED.