The Seven Deadly Sins...

One of the seven deadly sins, greed, has reared it's ugly head in my life. Not that I have fallen prey to it, well not lately at least. A person that I know has been caught red handed, as it were, and now has the world's judgement upon her head. Not a great position to be in. It is certainly her own doing, but I still feel sorry for her.
If you are of the puritanical bent then this feeling is not new to you. As kids we are instilled with 'sharing'; our papers, pencils, sandwiches. We are taught that greed is not something that we should ever be comfortable dealing with. We are taught to run away from it at all costs, which we TRY to do when we are little. As we get older we start to rationalize many things in our daily lives as a way to cope with what we live with and do, and greed is just one of those things that kind of creeps up on us. We go from an extra cookie before dinner to the entire cookie jar's contents when we think no one is looking. And this is just what happened to my acquaintence. I'm not sure where the idea came to just 'skim a bit off the top' one month from the proceeds that she was accountable for. It was mostly cash contributions, after all. Who could really tell how much was taken in, nevermind how much was being stolen? The temptation was there staring her in the face. And she gave in.
So, instead of just taking 'one cookie' before dinner she was well on her way to emptying the entire jar. The only thing is that what she has done couldn't be ignored as easily as she thought. She figured that she had it down pat and no one was really paying attention to what she was doing. But, when you make lots of cookies and find that the cookie jar is continually empty you start to look at who has access to it to find out why it's empty. Sooner or later you hope to catch the individual responsible.
My acquaintence will tell you that she has a great excuse for why she stole the money that she did. She 'couldn't help herself', or some such thing. And yes, she was weak willed. She is facing her own demons; bad health, an unhappy marriage, addiction to luxury brands. Lots of reasons 'why', but the word 'morality' never enters into the discussion, which is too bad.
In our present society 'morality' is a word that is seldom used. Which is a shame, as it's an excellent word to keep in your heart at all times. We need a bit more 'morality' in our everyday lives, it seems. But should it be up to society to continually teach us what morality means? Or is it something that we should learn when we are young and then integrate into our selves and follow every day, just like sharing. Maybe in times past morality was discussed more frequently than it is today so people don't think it's very important, but it is still there trying to guide us, if we will simply listen to what we know to be right. Just because we don't talk about morality much doesn't give anyone the excuse to indulge in any of the seven deadly sins. No matter how full the cookie jar may be.