SOME QUOTES ON THE SUBJECT OF NOT KNOWING WHEN TO SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Wendell Berry on Satisfaction:
[W]e have many commodities but little satisfaction, little sense of the sufficiency of anything. The scarcity of satisfaction makes of our many commodities an infinite series of commodities, the new commodities invariably promising greater satisfaction than the older ones. In fact, the industrial economy's most marketed commodity is satisfaction, and this commodity, which is repeatedly promised, bought, and paid for, is never delivered.
(Quoted by Shannon Jung in Food For Life, Augsburg Fortress, 2004, p. 3.)






Walter Brueggemann on scarcity and abundance
We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity — a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.
(From "The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity", Christian Century, March 24, 1999)






More from Walter Brueggemann:
We live in a world where the gap between scarcity and abundance grows wider every day. Whether at the level of nations or neighborhoods, this widening gap is polarizing people, making each camp more and more suspicious and antagonistic toward the other. But the peculiar thing, at least from a biblical perspective, is that the rich — the ones with the abundance--rely on an ideology of scarcity, while the poor — the ones suffering from scarcity — rely on an ideology of abundance. How can that be? The issue involves whether there is enough to go around — enough food, water, shelter, space. An ideology of scarcity says no, there's not enough, so hold onto what you have. In fact, don't just hold onto it, hoard it. Put aside more than you need, so that if you do need it, it will be there, even if others must do without. An affirmation of abundance says just the opposite: Appearances notwithstanding, there is enough to go around, so long as each of us takes only what we need. In fact, if we are willing to have but not hoard, there will even be more than enough left over. The Bible is about abundance.
(From "Enough Is Enough" - The Other Side , November-December 2001