Detach Yourself From All Worldliness
Today’s Gospel challenges us to detach ourselves from all forms of worldliness.
The story of the foolish rich man in today’s Gospel reminded me of a quote by Woody Allen: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Several years ago at the height of the world Financial Crisis which affected major economies in the developed world, there was a similar scandal in my own country regarding one of our major corporations. Persons invested significant sums into this company – often their life’s savings, in the hope of having a comfortable nest egg for retirement. Here one can almost hear an echo of the rich man’s words in this Sunday’s Gospel: “ I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my grain and my goods in them, and I will say to my soul: My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come; take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time.”
There is no obvious reason for the reader to suspect that the rich man who said these things to himself was immoral or dishonest in any way. The goods were the result, most likely of his hard work and his industriousness. The persons in the Trinidadian stories were the same, they had worked hard for many years and reaped “a good harvest.” Yet, it is an inescapable part of the mystery of life that hard work and noble intentions do not and cannot immunize us from loss and suffering. The corporation into which so many of these persons invested their hard-earned cash went “belly-up” and many persons lost most, if not all of their investment. It was a chaotic time. There as the story of one woman who having worked for years in nursing in Europe returned home and invested all her money, only to hear that it was all lost. She died from shock.
Here Jesus’ words ring true: “Watch and be on your guard against avarice of any kind, for a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than what he needs.” The warning against materialism is pretty obvious. We often worship at the altar of what our hands have made, at the altar of what we have been able to accumulate – through hard work in life. The lesson, I think, goes even deeper. We need to ask the Lord’s forgiveness for worshipping at the altar of what our own hands have made, this includes even our own good deeds and good intentions. This is what “we own.” Jesus says “Our lives are not made secure by what we own.” Not our material possessions, not our best intentions, not even our good deeds. No human being can save themselves or save a marriage.I have been dealing of late with persons whose marriages have dissolved in spite of their great efforts to be the ‘perfect’ spouse! One’s marriage is not made secure by ‘what one owns’- by his or her share of ‘good deeds’ to keep the marriage going. At times there is great anger and a sense of betrayal that somehow they did everything right and ‘God let them down.’
Jesus’ warning can also be applied to our relations with ‘power’ or the ‘power’ that we think we have. Many a person, priest or layman have had a difficult time surrendering to change, because of their relationship to power. But…Jesus says ‘a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns, nor by the power, he thinks he owns. The root problem in Jesus teaching is ‘possessiveness.’ What Jesus calls us to is utter ‘detachment’, detachment from physical things, detachment from our good deeds, detachment from our accomplishments, detachment from power. In the Christian Tradition, detachment means to ‘cut oneself off from something.’ It means the willingness to abandon a worldly value for the sake of a higher spiritual good. We give up valuable things, so we can attach ourselves to God who is the source of all value. In Trinidad and Tobago, there is an old saying: after one time, is two
Amen.
