Eternal Damnation for $1.99

In the supermarket, I came across a display of brightly colored silicone spatulas, priced at $1.99. My kitchen gadget assortment is rudimentary at best, and from time to time a spatula might come in handy. In fact, three nights ago--and I know this sounds pathetic--I was mixing up some chocolate chip cookie mix... well, long story short, but it ended up chocolate cookie cake... but I didn't have a spatula to scrape it out of the mixing bowl. Which was actually a salad bowl... but I digress.

I was at the supermarket. I grabbed a spatula and threw it in the cart, then trolled the aisles and got other stuff I needed. After going through the checkout line, I emerged from the store and saw the spatula wedged into the cart. I thought at first that the bag technician had forgotten to put the spatula in the bag, but then I realized I hadn't paid for it.

Here was my internal dialog:
"You should really go in and pay for that."
"I know... but it's a buck ninety-nine. It isn't as though I hid it."
"But you know the checker didn't see it."
"I didn't remember it was in their either!"
"You know now."
"It's a dollar ninety-nine! They won't even notice." I did imagine the item turning up missing in the inventory control database, though.
"So what if they don't notice? You know you took it."
"But I had no intention of leaving without paying."
"Nonetheless, you did leave without paying. And stealing is wrong."
"I didn't mean to steal it."
"Just the same... "
I thought about a time a few weeks ago, when the barista at Trieste Caffe gave me change for a $20, when I had actually given her a $10 bill. I didn't realize it until an hour or so later, and returned to the cafe and told her what I thought had happened. She shrugged and thanked me. But was it my innate virtue that brought me back, or something else? Did I want to be viewed as an honest person, or am I an honest person at heart? Certainly, a part of me was thinking, "Hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. And it isn't as though I won't spend that and a lot more on coffee in the coming weeks. And what does a cup of coffee cost Caffe Trieste? Twenty cents?"
Then, as now, my arguments against doing the right thing were weak and self-serving.
But today I was tired. I didn't want to go back into the store, find the clerk, explain the situation... and it was a dollar ninety-nine! I continued to my car. I put the groceries in the back.
Then I imagined the interview process for Heaven. Now, I can't say I don't have serious questions about the existence of Heaven, let alone the admission requirements. Nonetheless, I imagined an angel going over my life and coming to this exact moment. "Do you remember what happened May seventh, two-thousand-fourteen?"
"Uh... no."
"Remember a bright green spatula? Lucky supermarket..."
"Seriously?" I said. "You're gonna lock the pearly gates on me for a dollar ninety-nine?"
The angel shrugged. "It's a small failing... but a deliberate one. The commandment isn't 'Thou Shalt Not Steal Big, Valuable Things That People Will Notice.' It's 'Thou Shalt Not Steal.' Period. A moral imperative. No qualifications."
He had me there. But the truth is, I've broken other of the Ten Commandments--definitely broke the "Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of Thy Lord God in Vain" about a million times, and I've coveted my neighbor's goat and sometimes his wife, too... so if there's a very, very strict rule about adherence to The Ten Commandments, I'm going to be spending Eternity somewhere other than Heaven anyway.
But taking something that doesn't belong to me; knowingly possessing something that has that questionable moral taint to it... that was a tough one.
One time in college, my roommate, Tom, came home with a rickety rocking chair that he had stolen off of someone's porch. It was weathered and faded, and hardly staying together. The thing was, Tom didn't even know why he'd taken it, and he said he felt bad about it. Like me, he was ready with a rationalization. "But it was just outside. It was falling apart," he said. "They probably don't even care that it's gone."
He didn't convince himself. Over the next several days, he took the chair completely apart, refinished it, and reassembled it. He did a good job, and when he was done it was really a nice chair. Unfortunately, Tom kept it in his room. He would have made a far different impression had he taken the refinished chair and put it back on our neighbor's porch. But he didn't do that. So now, almost forty years later, I relate that story as an example of moral failure, rather than one of realizing one's failings and doing what one can do to make up for them.
Carrying the spatula, I went back in the store. My intention at first was to return to the clerk and explain the circumstances... and I confess that fleetingly I imagined her doing what the barista at Caffe Trieste did: say, "Oh, that is so nice of you!," thus reinforcing my sense of myself as a moral person. But I didn't want to wait for the clerk, so instead I just went to the self-serve checkout, scanned the spatula, and paid for it.
Then I left the store, puffed up by my own virtue and I thought... do I really need a spatula?