Page 2 of the Sunday business section of the New York Times has a sidebar called, “The Chatter,” quotations the editors think significant. One from yesterday will preach. “The religion of consumption has proven to be unfulfilling,” said Richard E. Jaffe, “a retail analyst at the investment firm Stifel Nicolaus. As Americans spend more on doing things like eating out and traveling instead of on buying products, department stores are losing out.”
“Consumption” is the old word for tuberculosis, a disease that wastes the body. This “consumption,” often called “consumerism,” deceives and wastes the soul. The deception is that acquiring more things will make you feel satisfied and fulfilled, but the devastation is that sooner or later you’ll realize things don’t fill your deepest longings. An agribusiness man thought he had it all until, “God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’” (Luke 12:20).
“Amidst our plenty something still…
To me, to thee, to him is wanting!
That cruel something unpossessed
Corrodes and leavens all the rest.” (Charles Wesley)
“The one who dies with the most toys wins.” Wins? Will you win when you come before God and you’ve been an idolater, buying into our society’s lure to find your value in things rather than in Him? Economists told us we were coming out of the Great Recession when consumers started spending. One of the problems with student debt, experts tell us, is that students won’t graduate and be able to buy things. Consumption is deep within our societal body. All that said, this will preach, not to club people with guilt (I suspect those deep in debt feel guilty enough already), but because the failure of “the religion of consumption” points us to our need for satisfaction that can only come through intimacy with our Creator and Redeemer, a trust freely given by the Spirit of God. So inventory your home, analyze your budget, reflect on what worries you, and then shift to the truth so famously stated by Saint Augustine, “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in You” (Confessions I, 1).
By the way, I wrote more about this in “Living in the Land of Milk and Honey” in the 2010 book, “The American Mind Meets the Mind of Christ,” available from Amazon.
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