Covetousness: A Short Memoir
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
I’ll admit it, I like a “listicle.” I’m sure you see them pop up frequently in your daily scroll: “The 25 Most Affordable Cities in the US;” “The 50 Most Popular Baby Names of 2025;” “The 100 Best Books of the Century.” They’re classic click bait, older than the internet itself, their enduring appeal the result of our collective literary laziness. You don’t have to actually read a “listicle;” it just requires a quick scan. Some poor, desperate recent college graduate–or, more likely these days, AI–may have been tasked with writing a little text at the top and bottom of the list, to provide context. But I’m guessing that, like me, you don’t read that text. Everyone just jumps right to the list.
There have even been listicles published about why the human brain likes listicles. They provide quick, easily digestible information. They help us process and organize facts. Sometimes they even help us make decisions, such as which coffee maker to buy or which TV show to stream next. I also suspect we click on them because we’re seeking some sort of validation. Is my city on the list of best places to live, my college one of the best values, my favorite movie one of the best of all-time?
God, having created our brains, knows intimately how our minds work. So perhaps that’s why He gave us the most famous, enduring, and profound list of all: The 10 Commandments. Only God could summarize all ways the human race can separate itself from Him in a short, 10-item list. But the more I contemplate the Commandments, the more I realize that beneath the simple “do’s and don’ts” I learned in grade school, countable on our fingers, lies an uncountable number of ways to break them. A thorough exploration of the Commandments and their violation would no doubt provide an almost infinitely wide and deep account of human history–sad, tragic, and catastrophic–since that fateful bite into the apple. But that’s beyond my, or perhaps almost anyone’s, reach.
My heightened awareness of the Commandments, and my own complex personal sin story of how I have broken them, has come during my engagement in a spiritual exercise called Forty Weeks: An Ignation Path to Christ with Sacred Story Prayer by William M. Watson, SJ. It’s a powerful spiritual tool based on the Ignation Examen. At Week 10, we are asked to study the Commandments and think about how they have played a role in our life stories. We explore how our own disobedience of those commandments may have influenced, or been influenced by, our circumstances, families, friends, and the culture.
A particularly illuminative exercise connects the Commandments with Seven Capital Vices (commonly known as the Seven Deadly Sins) and has us map patterns of those behaviors with our addictions. It was eye opening to spend 15 minutes a day for seven days contemplating my patterns of habitual sin. It’s sort of like scanning one of those listicles and saying to yourself, “Yeah, I’m real familiar with that one.” The purpose is to make you realize how you may almost blindly “sleepwalk” into habitual sin, and then help you to “wake up” to those things that most often block our connection to God.
It was the plunge into contemplation of the 10th Commandment that really woke me up. Covetousness, I found, was my most frequent, egregious sin.
It seems on the surface to be an almost pedestrian kind of sin, somewhat innocuous and certainly pervasive in our culture. I’ve committed it probably every day of my life–there’s always something I want that I don’t have. At first, I thought that it can’t be that bad, not that corrosive of the soul; it is the tenth and last Commandment, after all. Besides, is wanting what’s thrown in your face in a pop-up ad or hanging luringly on the end-cap at TJ Maxx the same as coveting your neighbor’s stuff? My contemplation led me to believe that yes, it can be pretty bad, and yes, I think that wanting “stuff” that doesn’t necessarily belong to your neighbor counts as covetousness.
As with many of us late baby boomers, I think the seed of the sin sprouted with the Sears Christmas Catalog, the most exciting mailbox delivery of the year in the 1960s. It was a veritable tome of things to covet, passed around amongst my siblings for weeks ahead of the holiday. At least five or six of the 500+ plus pages were dog-eared to indicate to my parents which toys and games that I knew would make my Christmas complete. After rifling through the catalog, my two siblings and I would sit in front of the TV during Advent and watch the obligatory animated Christmas specials (which, before the age of streaming, you only had one chance to catch), the narrative punctuated every few minutes by commercials, often displaying the same items shown in the catalog, feeding the flames of our nascent covetousness. Even the Charlie Brown Christmas special, with Linus quoting the Gospels and telling us that commercialism isn’t what Christmas is really all about, featured advertising geared to kids.
Yes, we went to mass on Christmas morning, but that was the “eating your vegetables” part of the day. At the heart of the family celebration, the highlight of the year, was the consumption of toys, food, and entertainment. Living in a household where the Catholicism was a little cursory, we got the unspoken message that, despite sermons by Linus or the priest, consumption was the point of the day. Even as a child, I was left a little hungry for something else. The weeks of anticipation were followed by a little flatness after dinner on Christmas night.
Later, my teenage years were marked by flipping through pages of Seventeen Magazine, my covetous eye turning from toys to clothes. For me, this phase corresponded with the rise of shopping mall. It was the mid-1970s, and my mother, armed with her own paycheck after years of being a stay-at-home mom, and now having an actual office to go to where she could wear the clothes she bought, embraced the mall experience with a passion. We lived within an hour’s drive of some of the most massive malls in the country, like Paramus Park and the Garden State Mall in northern New Jersey. But our favorite trip was to the Nanuet Mall in Rockland County, NY, where we made a day of it by eating hamburgers at the Bamburgers’ cafe (a rhyme we found amusing) before launching into a full afternoon of fashion foraging. The only tarnish on the day was how few things I could buy with my babysitting money. Other families may have spent Saturday afternoons at kids’ sporting events, doing lawn work, or having cookouts. For us, the trips to the mall were family-fun time.
In my 20s and 30s the price tags for the things I coveted got bigger. I became about buying cars, then condos, then houses. Houses in particular–and their decor, furnishings, and appliances–loomed large in the collective acquisitive imagination of my peers in the 1980s and 1990s, well before House Hunters and Zillow threw gas on the fire.
Then, after we had children, it was about “experiences” we could buy for them and vicariously for us: travel, extracurricular and enrichment activities, and ultimately the selection and purchase of their college educations. Just like when I was a teen, I took my daughter to the mall for a day of shopping as a “pick me up” for both of us. When grandma came to visit, shopping was always on the agenda.
But when I spent intentional time contemplating my covetousness as part of the 40 Weeks exercise, I “woke up” to the extent to which purchases inhabited my imagination and marked my maturation as an American. I was always looking forward to the next “new” thing–a new sweater, a new dress, a new meal in a new restaurant, a new car, house, vacation. Purchases seemed to mark the major events in my life, the quality of my life, even the goals in my life. To a surprising degree, I realized that buying things (including meals and vacations) was the topic of many of my conversations with friends. My personal telos seemed to be to consume, if not the most, at least the best (car, house, meal, vacation). Or to get the best bargain. What was at the root of this? Certainly the dopamine hit that you get when you buy a new dress or when that truck pulls up in your driveway with a new sofa is part of it. But it’s also the admiration when others affirm how great you look in the dress, how nice the sofa looks in your living room, how smart you were to get such a good price.
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
When I did the exercise that correlated the Commandments with the Seven Deadly sins, I drew connecting arrows from Covetousness to both Greed and Pride. That quest for admiration after a purchase is all wrapped up in pride, and is tinged with just a bit of narcissism. When something that’s rooted in narcissism takes up that much brain space, it has become an addiction that needs to be reckoned with. Doing the exercise “woke me up” to the fact that consumerism can seep in and become the dominating, everyday energy of our lives–and not a healthy one. It’s an habitual sin that’s sanctioned, indeed encouraged, by American culture.
There’s no better descriptor of how it feels to habitually sin than in the St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Chapter 7, verse 15: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” That’s me on my third trip to TJMaxx in as many weeks, when there’s nothing I really need. And in verse 19: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want.” Is shopping evil? Well, no. But buying things, especially when you don’t need them, is not meant to be the defining narrative of our lives.
The genius of the Ignation spiritual exercise is that it shows how breaking a commandment like “Thou shall not covet,” evolves from vice to addiction–a need for the dopamine hit of the purchase when the actual purchase is not needed at all. Like all addictions, it keeps you from thinking about the beauty of God’s creation around us, how to be grateful, and, particularly, the needs of others. Jesus says in Luke 3:11: “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” The flip side of covetousness, I think, is a “shall” command: “Thou shall share with your neighbor.”
And this is why I think covetousness of all things, not just your neighbors’ things, violates the commandment. Because it puts the love of those things that are just wants and not needs above the love of God and detracts from generosity to neighbors. When that happens, it’s time to circle back to Commandment Number One.
Can we be faulted for all this covetousness? After all, America’s free market economy is based on it. Some estimate that we see as many as 5,000 advertisements in a day (although we don’t actually absorb anywhere near that many). As a culture, we’ve thrown every effort behind acquisition. We were taught to want stuff—by our parents, our peers, and the media. We were told that stuff would make you happy, and that living without stuff was undesirable, embarrassing, even a source of shame. We’ve turned significant life passages into shopping events: weddings become about the beautiful dress, spectacular flowers, an impressive venue; giving birth focuses on a high-end crib, trendy strollers, stylish baby clothes. We become merely consumers, and then by extension we begin to objectify, valorize, and monetize everything, even relationships. We even measure the health of our nation with economic indicators of productivity and consumption. We begin to confuse the material of our lives with the purpose of our lives.
Of course, we need clothes, cars, and places to live. And our children benefit from experiences and activities we can provide them. We all want a good life filled with good things. The free market economy is not a bad thing; we’ve come to learn its merits by seeing what happens when countries try to eliminate it. But it is here to serve us, we are not here to serve it. You can’t blame capitalism, the free market, or any economic system when you’re the one who got your priorities wrong. If, like me, you find that you may have spent years dozing in the haze of consumerism, it’s time to “wake up” and pay attention to the good things in life that aren’t, and can’t be, advertised or purchased.
Will I ever go shopping again? Of course. The challenge for me will be to try to focus on who I’m doing it with, not what I’m buying. I have friends who like to spend a day “thrifting” and having lunch. It’s fun. It’s a way to bond. Moving forward, I’ll focus on the joy of spending time with people I’m doing it with, not the things I’m buying. I’ll work on subordinating my identity as a consumer to that of being a child of God, and keep that most important “listicle of sins,” the Ten Commandments, top of mind. And if I find a bargain that’s irresistible, I’ll strongly consider donating it to someone who needs it.
