I recently played golf with my brother Ken at Pebble Beach (a perquisite from my employment there). As we were ending our round it was becoming dark and we noticed that almost none of the mansions along the course had the lights on. That was because no one was home.
This is the way it often is unless there is a prestigious event being held in the gated Pebble Beach community. These multi-million dollar homes were second or third homes held, I have been told, for show-pieces for the very wealthy.
I saw this played out some months ago as I was spectating at a golf tournament held at Pebble at one of the most ostentatious of the houses along the fourteenth fairway. A man sat, alone with his drink, his ascot and blue blazer and loafers and jeans, surrounded by his stable of five or six very expensive collector’s automobiles (Ferraris, Bentleys, Buggatis, Lamborginis, etc.) watching the people on the golf course look at him. And he looked pathetic. It seemed very clear to me that this was an unhappy man whose money could not buy him what he so desired—validation and love.
One of my favorite thinkers, Hugh Nibley, has hit the nail on the head regarding this topic in his essay, “Breakthroughs I would like to see,” from his book Approaching Zion. He says, ‘More than enough is more than enough[!].’
And how much is ‘enough?’ I would say, when ‘I have sufficient for my needs.’ I think we become unbalanced when we go much beyond this. My religion teaches me that the Lord says, “I give not unto you that ye shall live after the manner of the world.” And what is the manner of the world? I think that in our society it is using our every energy and resource to obtain wealth or the things we think we can buy with it. From the scriptures comes this: “Ye are cursed because of your riches, and also are your riches cursed because ye have set your hearts upon them.” Says Nibley: ‘Like medicine, the stuff of this earth is to preserve life; too much of it is unnecessary and dangerous and so is not enough.’ We may find that, as Nibley also says, ‘Wealth is an almost insuperable barrier to entering the kingdom [of God].’
Well, this should be an unpopular essay.
2 comments:
Can you imagine how many villages in Africa or South America, he could furnish with a well for drinking water from just selling one of those cars? Or, how many vaccines or mosquito nets he could provide? What an impact he could have. It makes me think about what I would look like to a person from that country-maybe like the man on the porch.
Not money but the love of money that is the problem. I think we can only judge for ourselves where we are in our capatalistic sojourn, which I think we will agree is right in our terrestrial world...but we can argue this out in France.
Post a Comment