The last few weeks I've been posting excerpts from the cover story of my paper's Sunday real estate section, which "spotlights" an extravagant home from the area.
As I wrote here: "This is the cover of the real estate section — a place where normal people might turn to buy and sell a home. It doesn't seem either wise or kind to these people to dedicate the cover of this section each week to showcasing homes deliberately chosen to make the actual homes of actual people look shabby by comparison."
Some have responded to this as though I had written that large, luxurious homes — and by extension, wealth itself — were inherently evil.
That's not what we Christians believe. Christian teaching has not held that wealth is inherently evil, only that it is morally perilous (see for example Clement of Alexandria's "The rich man's salvation"). It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
One of my favorite illustrations of this distinction is the following story told by Mother Teresa in her 1997 book No Greater Love:
Not so long ago a very wealthy Hindu lady came to see me. She sat down and told me, "I would like to share in your work" … The poor woman had a weakness that she confessed to me. "I love elegant saris," she said. Indeed, she had on a very expensive sari that probably cost around 800 rupees. Mine cost only eight rupees …
It occurred to me to say to her, "I would start with the saris. The next time you go to buy one, instead of paying 800 rupees, buy one that costs 500. Then with the extra 300 rupees, buy saris for the poor."
The good woman now wears 100-rupee saris, and that is because I have asked her not to buy cheaper ones. She has confessed to me that this has changed her life. She now knows what it means to share. That woman assures me that she has received more than what she has given.
Mother Teresa did not condemn the woman's elegant taste, but instead helped her to put it to good use. The lady had too much style to buy ugly saris for the poor women. Her problem had not been her sense of fashion and love of beautiful things, but rather the self-centered focus of that love. Mother Teresa did not tell her that this love of beauty was wrong — only that it needed to grow to account for the needs of others as well.
A shorter version of the same story comes from a friend of Bertolt Brecht, who remembered the playwright as someone who "loved the good things in life — so much so, in fact, that he wanted everyone to enjoy them."
I've got no problem with extravagant houses per se. But I do have a serious problem with those who would pretend that such houses are "normal" or within the reach or realistic aspiration of the vast majority of Americans.
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