More Humility

Today, we hear both in Sirach (3:17-18) and from Jesus (Lk 17:7-14) that humility is a good thing – even a necessary thing to live a holy life – yet who wants to be humble?  As a young boy, I had major issues with humility.  I was, and Mary would say that I still am, intensely competitive.  I had to win.  I had to be right.

My mom always cringed when my cousin, Jimmy, and I got together and pulled out a board game.  She claimed both of us were really ugly losers.  I don’t know about Jimmy, but she was probably right about me.  Today, Mary says the only time she hears me shout in anger is when I’m watching the Yankees or Notre Dame on TV and things aren’t going too well.

Incredibly enough, as a six or seven-year old, though I didn’t tell anyone the results, I kept track of my win-loss record in games I played with other people – including games of Old Maid I played with my elderly grandmother.  I was undefeated against Grandma – but it probably would have taken some of the glory out it if I had known that she was letting me win every game.

I hated the expression, “you can’t win them all.”  I had to grudgingly admit that it was true – except for Old Maid with Grandma – but you could still try to win every game, every encounter, and everything, for wasn’t all of life a game of sorts?  Wasn’t it virtuous to strive to be the fastest, the smartest, the rightest and the best?

I associated being humble with being a loser.   Losing was more than a disappointment, it was, like the man asked to step lower in today’s story, embarrassing and humiliating.  What fun is that? 

And as parents, don’t we want to teach our children to stand up for their rights?  Who wants to see people take advantage of our children, to see others step all over them?  That’s not right, is it?  And isn’t that what humility will get them, the short end of the stick?

Upon reflection, humility was not my problem; it was simply my idea of humility that caused me grief.  More importantly, my concept of being “exalted” – having people think I was a winner, someone of great esteem – was way too limited, just as it was for the hosts at the dinner where Jesus finds himself.

Note that in the seating strategy at the feast, the game is for a fixed amount of honor.  There is only one seat of honor, and if you get it, someone else doesn’t.  And if someone else gets it, you don’t.  When my thinking is along those lines, I gain immense pleasure from “winning the game.”  Jesus doesn’t give us the details, but you can imagine the smirk on the face of the guest in the lower seat as he is invited higher.  Or imagine the self-satisfied look on the face of the newly-arrived honored guest as he bumps someone down the table.  That pleasure I sense when I achieve honor or esteem relative to those around me has a name.  It is pride.  And one consequence of pride is the destruction of relationships.  After all, how can I show the love that Jesus demands if I am in desperate competition for the seat of honor?

And here is where Christian humility becomes so necessary.  For Christian humility is grounded not in the fixed, finite honor available from the people around us, but is based on the infinite love of God, the one who created me, the one who loves me despite all my failings, despite being so far beyond my understanding, even despite my efforts to ignore Him and the gift he offers me.

Humility is recognizing that God has showered this love on each and every one of his creatures, as only one with infinite and unconditional love can do.  It matters not if I am winning or losing, or if I am right or wrong, or if people honor or despise me.  God continues to love me in the same way, as he continues to love you, and as he continues to love every human who has ever lived, who lives, and who will ever live.

Only when I get this can I understand the paradox that Jesus teaches – if I am humble, I cannot be humiliated.  If I am humble, I am pleased, not indignant, with the success of others, knowing that God desires good for all of his creatures, and the other’s good in no way detracts from the good that I have received, namely the infinite and unconditional love of God.  If I am humble, I can eagerly and generously share with others the love which God gives me, knowing that I have already been paid in kind, and will be continue to be loved more than I can imagine, even beyond the end of time itself.

Only with humility can our relationship with God, can our relationships with each other, be complete.  Only in humility can we be truly exalted.  

Needy people

We are needy people.  There is nothing wrong with this.  It simply recognizes that we cannot survive without needing something from outside ourselves.  We need nutrition.  We need air to breath.  We need shelter from an environment that is not always congenial to our survival.  If these primal, physiological needs are not met, we cannot survive.  This is true of us, as it is true of all living things here on earth.   

But as humans, we need more.  Unlike plants and animals, we can never be completely satisfied; we can never truly thrive, simply by having our basic physiological needs fulfilled.  We need love.  We need to know that we are loved.  Without this knowledge, we live desperate lives, never truly at peace no matter how well we can feed ourselves and shelter ourselves from the elements.

St. Augustine, whose feast we celebrate today, understood this deeply.  He spent many years restlessly searching for love, and only found it when he recognized the love that God had for him.  He describes this revelation in the opening of his autobiography, “Confessions” – “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

St. John describes this love eloquently in today’s passage from his first letter (1 Jn 4:7-16).  This is a love so great that God gave us his Son as an offering for our sins.  This is a love so great that God gives us his Spirit that we might know that he dwells in us, empowering us to love as he loves us.  This love is pure gift, as it is the very essence of God.  God is love.  There is nothing we need do but accept it.

Yet, we forget that it was a gift.  Our pride kicks in, telling us that we have worked so hard and so well that we have earned this love; we deserve this love.  From there, it is a simple step to believe that we are somehow more deserving, somehow more good, somehow more holy, somehow more loved and more exalted, just somehow more than other people who are obviously somewhat less. 

And when we fall into this trap – the snare of the devil – when we start believing that the titles we bestow on ourselves make us more exalted than others, we have refused God’s great gift of love.  We become like the pagans or the Pharisees and scribes who Jesus is castigating in our passage this morning (Mt 23).  We love only those who love us; we hate those who hate us; we may even kill those who threaten us in any way.  We reject the universal brotherhood and sisterhood that Jesus calls each of us to live in.  We choose hell – living with eternal anxiety and dissatisfaction – when God offers us salvation – living with the unconditional love, eternal peace and absolute joy that Jesus won for us by humbling becoming one of us and that God continues to give us this day through his Holy Spirit.

Reject pride and humbly accept this amazing gift.  Love unconditionally and universally as God loves all of his creation.  See in each and every person one whom Jesus was born for and one whom Jesus died for, as he was born and died for me, as he was born and died for you. 

Only in this humility, can we recognize and realize the exaltation that God desires for every one of us.  Only by resting in him are our deepest needs fulfilled.   

The Narrow Gate

To understand the curious question that is asked of Jesus in today's reading, we must step back just a few verses.  Just before the passage we heard this morning, Jesus had been describing the kingdom of God with the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast.  Both parables suggest that the kingdom will grow to enormous proportions from very small beginnings. 

This must have sounded odd to the disciple who asks Jesus if only a few people would be saved. (Lk 13:23) Presumably, he thought of the kingdom more narrowly, possibly restricted just to the Chosen People or, even more limited, just to those who ate and drank with Jesus himself.  To our questioner's anticipated delight, this exclusive group was one to which he happened to belong.

In a way, this jibes with our own experience and expectations.  We lock the doors at night once we are safely inside.  We close the membership to our clubs once we are safely admitted.  It wouldn't make any sense to do otherwise.  We build gated communities to assure that only those who belong can enter.  Similarly, we create boundaries or limits on God's mercy only when we are certain that we fall within those limits.

But this very complacency, this sense that we are right to belong, to be insiders, keeps us outside the very door we feel we have already entered.  Jesus tells us that the true way into the kingdom is a hard one, though it is open to everyone.  The Greek word we translate as "strive" in "Strive to enter through the narrow gate" is the root word of our English word "agony."  Apparently, this striving is not easy – it is an agonizing struggle.

In ancient walled cities, the narrow gate was a gate only one person wide.  It was easily defended as only one person could pass through at a time.  This makes it an apt analogy for our entry to paradise, for our narrow gate is, in fact, one person wide, - Jesus.  But where is the struggle, the striving?  Being with Jesus can actually be pleasant.  For example, consider our celebration this morning at Eucharist.  The singing, the praying, the camaraderie are all pleasant things.  We pray for the troubles of the world, but they generally don't intrude on our Mass.  And we even get graces and the real presence of Jesus!  What’s so hard or difficult about that?

But Jesus wants more as Luke reminds us at the very beginning of today’s reading.  Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, to the cross.  And if we are to struggle to enter paradise through Jesus, we must not only eat and drink in his presence, we must also carry his cross with him.

And Jesus' cross is one of constant, universal love: love of family, love of friends, love of neighbors, and most importantly, love of enemies.  For without loving our enemies, our love becomes simply what the pagans do.  Christian love is much more.  And the cross we bear is that this Christian love is not always – in fact, is not usually – requited love.  It may even provoke division and animosity.   However, as fellow cross bearers with Christ, we are measured by how we love, not by how we are loved.

How can we show this love every day, to everyone?  That is where we struggle and strive.  Many times, it seems unfair to love others unconditionally.   Take our nation’s struggle with the issue of undocumented immigrants.  How do we balance our right to private property with Jesus’ command to share with those who have less?  How do we balance our love for others with our need to provide for ourselves?  How do we know when enough is enough?  For Jesus, there is no balance, just more love – eternal, unconditional love, the same love that God shows us in the gift of his only Son.  This world offers no guarantees.  All of our property and all of our money cannot guarantee our happiness, no matter how jealously we guard it.  All of our love will not guarantee that others will love us in the same way.

Yet in uncertainly, we keep struggling, we keep praying, we keep proclaiming and sharing God's love as best we can.  For if we stop struggling, if we stop loving, one of two things must be true.  Either we have ignored Jesus completely or we are certain of that which we cannot be certain – that we have done enough.  In either case, Jesus tells us, we will have placed ourselves outside the door, outside the kingdom, despite God's constant invitation for us to enter.

Struggle and strive, give thanks for our occasional successes, ask forgiveness for our frequent failures, and pray for the strength to keep striving.  Only by doing so can we hope to be counted among those from the north and the south, those from the east and the west, those that take their place at the feast in the kingdom of God.

Jesus throws a curve

A paradox is like a curve ball.  It shouldn’t physically or logically happen, but it does.  The foundation of Christianity is paradox.  Without paradox, there is not Christianity.

The master takes on the form of a slave.  Through death, we gain life.  The last shall be first and the first shall be last.  The greatest among you is the slave of all.  Happy are those who are poor, who mourn, and who are persecuted.  Through our weakness, we are strong.

Today, Jesus presents throws us another  curve.  “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth?”  (Lk 12:51a) Well, yeah, that’s certainly what I thought.  Remember those angels proclaiming peace on earth when Jesus was born?  Yet Jesus goes on to describe the great divisions that will result from his coming – divisions that will rend all of society even down to its basic unit – the nuclear family.  Why would this be?   More paradox.  It doesn’t seem to make any sense at all…and it doesn’t, as long as I apply human, earth-based logic to divine, heaven-based salvation.

We live in a world of finite resources, a world which usually rewards hard work with a bigger share of those finite resources, a world in which the fittest survive and the weakest die, a world where happiness is inextricably tied to pleasure, possessions, power, and prestige, a world which in which I have a discrete beginning and an inevitable end.

In such a world, some are winners and some are losers.  In a finite world, this is logically inevitable.  Stuck in that world, my focus becomes making sure that I and mine work hard enough to deserve to be among the winners.

But then Jesus comes.  He offers God’s infinite love and eternal life to one and to all, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the lowly, the happy and the sad, the saints and the sinners.  And all he asks is that we follow him and live generously, lovingly, and radically – to the point of being a slave to all, to the point of laying our lives down for another – just as he became a slave for all of us, just as he laid down his life for us.

And while this may sound like good news – isn’t infinite happiness and eternal life what we’ve been waiting for? – Jesus knows that not everyone will think it so.  Jesus understands that the winners of this world will think they don’t need to be slaves.   They’ve already put in their time and are now enjoying its rewards.  They don’t need to lay down their lives for somebody else, for if others worked as hard as they did, or were as good as they were, those others could earn their own reward.

Jesus’ coming does not comfort these people, it burns them.  All their hard work, all their success, all their status, wealth, prestige and power goes up in smoke.  As I do, they do.  They seek to avoid being burned.  Who would want that?  They separate themselves from anyone carrying this message as surely as I separate myself to protect myself from anyone who wishes to harm me or take from me what is justly mine.  If the fire is too close and I can’t separate, I try to eliminate and dowse the fire.

Thus when Jesus comes, even though he may desire peace and joy and unity for all, divisions are as inevitable as death and taxes.  Those who feel burned by the message will be separate themselves from, and, if necessary, persecute those who burn them – and that would be Jesus and all who follow him.

So, if I am alive and I don’t feel the divisions or the persecutions, one of two things is true – and neither of them is good.

First, I have been completely successful in insulating myself from Jesus’ word, that it has no effect on my or on any of those around me – we are living comfortably in our finite, rewards-and-punishments, self-centered and pleasure-driven world.  I don’t try to live as Jesus wants me to because I believe I’m doing fine on my own.  There is no need for faith, for I’ve already saved myself.  I’ve rejected God.  Ironically, shielded from the burning on earth, I’m living in the burning fires of hell.

The second option is not much better.  I listen to Jesus.  I think I’m living as he wants me to, but I still don’t sense that people are trying to avoid me or insult me for this.  Certainly nobody is persecuting me for this.  I guess that’s what heaven is like, but the violent world around me certainly isn’t heaven.  So how closely am I following Jesus?  If my commitment to Jesus doesn’t cause others to look askance, to be discomfited, to be burned by it, how hot is the faith in my heart.  I have faith, perhaps, but it is a cold, not burning.  I’m not all the way to hell, but I’m certainly headed towards it.

They threw Jeremiah into the muck of a cistern; they hung Jesus on a cross.  Where is the cistern or the cross in my life?  Jesus tells me if it’s not there, I haven’t listened hard enough or followed closely enough.  I am lost. 

Seek out and pick up the cross, give thanks to God for the cross, carry the burning cross of selflessness, the burning cross of generosity, the burning cross of love, the burning cross of Jesus – and the kingdom of heaven is ours.

We are not alone

Studies have shown that children who know more facts and stories about their family histories tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity, have a stronger sense of self-control and self-esteem, and have a deeper sense that their families function well.

Why would knowing facts such as where your grandparents grew up, or where your parents went to high school, or some illness or terrible thing that had happened to someone in your family, have such an impact on a child?  Marshall Duke, the psychologist who conducted these studies, suggests that these children have a strong intergenerational self.  They know that they are not alone in the world, that they belong to something bigger than themselves.

This shouldn’t be too surprising to us as Catholics.  We have long nurtured our intergenerational selves by venerating the saints.  We read stories of the saints’ lives, we celebrate their feast days in our liturgies and pageants, and we name saints as patrons of churches, trades, illnesses and causes.  We claim particular saints as our personal patrons, perhaps associated with our names or birthdates.

But this is not an exercise in ancestor worship, for our connection with the saints goes much deeper.  We are in communion with the saints.  While they may seem dead to the foolish (Wis 3:2), they still live today one with God, just as we hope to someday live one with God.  They are our prayer partners in faith, our friends as well models of faith to inspire us.

By knowing the stories of the saints, who, with one exception, were sinners just like us, sinners who, at times, struggled in their faith, yet found the grace of God to overcome their struggles and be one with God, we find strength and resilience in the face of our own struggles and difficulties.  We find the love to give generously when we could easily keep whatever we had.  We find the courage to forgive when the world insists that we get even.  We find the power to hope in the goodness of God, despite the evil that can seem pervasive in our world.

Today, we honor and remember the edifying life – and most especially, the edifying death – of St. Maximilian Kolbe.  Born in 1894 in Poland, he joined the Conventual Franciscans as a teenager and was ordained a priest in 1918.  He was devoted to the Virgin Mary and led quite a productive priesthood, including six years as a missionary in Japan.  He founded many friaries.  In the face of local opposition, he had a friary built outside Nagasaki, Japan.  The locals insisted that he was building on the wrong side of the mountain, for they felt the spirits would be more propitious on the other side.  When the atom bomb fell some ten years later, the friary was sheltered from the blast and survives to this day. 

Maximilian was back in Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939, and he provided shelter for many refugees, including almost 2,000 Jews in his friary.  He was soon arrested by the Germans, and ultimately sent to Auschwitz in 1941. 

Later that year, after three prisoners disappeared from the prison, the Nazis declared that ten men would be chosen at random to starve to death in an underground bunker to deter future escape attempts.  When one of the selected prisoners – a Polish soldier named Franciszek Gajownicszek – cried out “My wife and my children!,” Fr. Kolbe immediately volunteered to take his place in the death chamber. 

Fr. Kolbe celebrated Mass in the death chamber, using crumbs of bread and wine that had been smuggled to him.  He sang Marian hymns each day, ministering to his fellow inmates as one died after another.  After two weeks, only Fr. Kolbe was still alive.  The guards killed him with an injection of carbolic acid.

Pope Paul VI beatified Maximilian Kolbe in 1971 and Pope John Paul II canonized him in 1982.  Mr. Gajownicszek was present at both the beatification and the canonization, dying in 1995 at the age of 94.   He considered it his duty to tell all the people he met about the heroic act of love by Maximilian Kolbe.

Indeed, we are not alone.  We belong to something much larger than us…and we are stronger for it.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us.

Witnesses to the Unseen

I’ll believe it when I see it.  Seeing is believing.  In many ways, this skeptical, “show me” attitude can be very practical.  We teach our children to examine the claims of advertisers carefully.  We pride ourselves on our rationality.  Few of us want to look the fool.

But of course, our faith is premised on believing in what we cannot see.  In Hebrews this morning, we hear a beautiful definition of faith: “…the realization of what is hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.”

We believe in God.  We believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son.  We are loved by God, who created us in his own image, who died for us, who rose for us and saved us for all time.

But how do we know?  While the theologians tell us the faith is a gift from God, that’s not always a very satisfying answer, is it?  It seems a bit circular.  I believe in God because God has “told” me to believe in Him.  Is there something else here?

As it turns out, there is.  While we cannot see God directly, and while we may not be able to reach out and physically sense the mystical change of the bread and wine into the flesh, blood and divinity of Jesus Christ, God allows us to see him working though other people.  It is their faith, their witness that is the “evidence of things not seen.”  It is their faith that supports and strengthens our own faith.  In Hebrews, we hear a roll call of some of the giants of faith: Abraham, our father in faith, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob.   And the roll call continues down through the ages.

For example, we can presume, with reasonably historical certitude, that Jesus was crucified under Pilate – not only the Gospels, but Roman historians testify to it – and that, a short time after his death, his tomb was found to be empty.  It must have been empty, or the assertions of the early disciples of the resurrection would have been easily ridiculed.  How could he have risen, there’s his body in the tomb.  So the tomb was empty, but how?  The disciples had faith that Jesus has risen from the dead.  Others claimed that they had simply stolen the body to perpetuate a hoax. 

A hoax certainly seems more plausible.  Then why do over a billion people today believe in the resurrection?  In large part, because virtually all of those early witnesses paid for their faith with their lives, dying in many ugly ways rather than deny what they knew to be true.  Would they have does so for a hoax?  I can’t imagine it.  And their faith to the point of martyrdom simply drew others to that same faith.  Thus, Tertullian, an early church Father, could assert that the martyr’s blood is the seed of the Church.

Over time, many millions of others have witnessed the faith through lives of love, generosity, peace, and trust in God.  Some of these we have formally named as “saints.”  I find solace and support for my faith by reading stories of these saints, and stories about how the saints have influenced others.  For example, James Martin’s book, “My Life with the Saints,” is a very enjoyable and humorous witness of how the saints supported and enhanced Fr. Martin’s life and faith.

And if these witnesses are not enough, the “saints” are not just those who have died before us, “marked with the sign of faith.”  Many of them live among us today, even right here in Newtown!  Jesus tells us directly that we can and should draw others to God.  “Let you light shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”  (Mt 5:16). 

For the past several months – for almost a year now – my faith has been bolstered tremendously by the witness of those here in Newtown and around the world who responded in great faith to our horrific and unjust loss on 12/14.  Their faith – and particularly the faith of the families most directly affected – encouraged and strengthened them to respond as Jesus commands us – to turn the other cheek, to love your enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, and to forgive seventy-seven times.  Many responded as Jesus instructed his disciples to respond when he was unjustly arrested and led to his death – “Put your sword back in its place, for all who take the sword with perish by the sword.”  (Mt 26:52)  

Martyrs, saints, witnesses – whatever we call them – make real everything in which we hope; their faith is the evidence of what we cannot see.  They fill us with hope when all seems lost, supplant our doubts with faith, and open our hearts to trust in the one who created us, who became one of us and who died for us, and yet rose again to live with us until the end of time.

For all these faithful witnesses, give glory to God in the highest.

Radical faith

Did you notice something a bit unusual in today’s Gospel?  (Mt 15:21-28)  This may be the only time in the Gospels that Jesus loses an argument!  I guess he really was fully human!

When his disciples first report the Canaanite woman’s request, Jesus is emphatic:  No way can he cure her daughter, his mission is only to the lost sheep in Israel.  We’ve heard this before.  When Matthew describes Jesus sending the 12 disciples on their first mission, they are not to go to pagan territory or visit Samaritan towns, but instead to tend to the “lost sheep of Israel.” 

When the woman personally asks Jesus, he seems to insult her and her people, referring to them as “dogs!”  Yet, she reminds Jesus that even the dogs receive food from their masters.  Jesus is out of arguments.  He relents and cures her daughter.   

Matthew uses today’s story of the Canaanite woman to show a transition in Jesus’ outlook from a very particular mission to the people of Israel to a universal mission of teaching all nations.  And what shifts the perspective?   Jesus finally sees the faith that he seeks in all of us, and he finds it not where anyone might have expected it, among one of the chosen people, but in a Canaanite woman.  And it was not just a simple profession, but a radical faith that transcended all conventional bounds; a radical faith that stood up against the stiffest challenge; a faith which could draw all people to Jesus.

The woman’s challenge, on a personal level, was just as daunting as that faced by the Hebrews as they first approached the Promised Land.  As we heard in Numbers, they were impressed by the land, but intimidated by the size, strength and defenses of its occupants.  They lost faith in God’s power.

The Canaanite woman had no business approaching Jesus for anything.  In a sense, she was an anti-Hebrew, a member of the very people who were ancestral enemies of the Hebrews.  Yet she kept faith.

She was a woman who, in the culture of the time, had no right to address any teacher directly.  Apparently, she had no with no support from the male members of her family.  She certainly had no support from the male followers of Jesus.  Yet she kept faith.

Jesus himself rebuffs her in what seems like a particularly cold, cruel and sarcastic tone.  Yet she kept faith – a truly radical faith.  And this radical faith changes everything.   This radical faith is the faith that saves.

For most of my life, though, I didn’t really get it.  Okay, I knew that my faith was important.  Without it, I could not be saved.  Without it, I would never be with God in heaven.  But that was it.  Have faith, get into heaven.  Now, I can get on with the rest of my life.

But how do I know if I truly have the radical faith of this Canaanite woman?  St. Paul has a clue for me.  St. Paul knows that the effects of faith are much more immediate than changing our ultimate destiny.  Radical faith in Jesus changes our lives in the here and now, just as the woman’s daughter is immediately cured.  Radical faith is transformative, both on us and, ultimately, on the world.

When we live with a radical faith in Jesus and allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, we are transformed, for Paul explains, “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

While that certainly sounds attractive, here we stand, two thousand years later, in a world torn apart by hatred, by unspeakable violence, and by war; divided by religion, by race, by class, by as many ways as the human mind can conjure; a world where millions of people are killed each year, perhaps because they were too inconvenient, too old, too dependent, too criminal, or simply in the way of war.  How can this be?

Have we lost touch with the radical nature of the faith shown by the Canaanite woman?  I know that if I am honest, at least part of the solution – and the only part that I can directly control – lies in me; lies in my often conventional, rarely radical faith.

I hear Jesus say “love your enemies,” “pray for those who persecute you,” and “forgive seventy-seven times.”  You can’t get much more radical that that!  Yet when someone hurts me or my family, prayer and mercy are rarely my first reaction.  Instead, I easily lose my temper and strike back in some way.  A perfectly natural thing, I might even argue a perfectly just and prudent thing.  Yet it renounces the faith that Jesus seeks in me.  How much power does Jesus have if my faith is not radical enough to transform retribution into reconciliation, violence into virtue, hatred into love?

Pray with me that all of us grow in courage and grow in faith, the radical faith of the Canaanite woman, the radical faith that teaches all nations the saving power of Jesus Christ. 

I and me, my and mine

I’m certainly no farmer.  My thumb is definitely more black than green.  Yet, the farmer’s conversation (Lk 12:13-21) rings true for me, for I have often had similar conversations with myself.  The difference is that my conversation has usually been a prospective one.  It is usually prompted by something like this:

I am driving along in my car listening to the radio and a very excited voice interrupts the broadcast:  “Tonight’s Powerball jackpot is now $300 million!”  And the conversation begins.  How easy my life would be if I just won that prize.  I would pay off all of my debts.  I would not have to work another day.  I could do all the things I always wished I could do.  I would invest wisely so that I’d never want again.  That sounds pretty much like “eat, drink and be merry” to me.

Of course, I tell myself, I’m not greedy like the farmer.  I’m a generous soul.  So I throw in a few charities into the mix.  The church says I should tithe, but I can do more.  In my better days, I can even envision giving away as much as half of the prize.   Only then do I realize that this makes almost no difference at all – I am still just as foolish as the farmer. 

I have fallen into the same trap as the farmer did – the insidious snare of I and me, my and mine.  Notice the propensity of these words in the farmer’s – and in my – conversation.  “I shall,” “my harvest,” “my barns,” “my grain,” “I say to myself,” etc., etc., etc.  But where did the grain come from?  Not from the farmer.  The parable’s opening line tells us the answer – “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.”  The harvest was from God, just as everything the man owned – and he owns much as Jesus tells us he was already a rich man even before the harvest – was from God.  But the farmer assumes that God’s providence becomes his possessions, to be used for his comfort and his pleasure. 

Don’t I do the same?  God provides and I claim firm and absolute possession.  Mine, mine, mine, I say.  Yet God, out of his infinite, eternal and unconditional love for me, provides not for my own pleasure and comfort, but simply so that I can offer that same providence to others.  I am to share as abundantly as I receive, in the sure and certain trust that God will continue to provide all that I need, since he will continue to love me with his infinite, eternal and unconditional love. 

I am simply the steward of God’s great providence – I possess nothing and nothing is mine.  And while I possess nothing, I also want nothing, and need but little, as long as I trust in God’s eternal providence. 

But when my trust fails, - and, unfortunately, it fails often – I grasp tightly to whatever I can, jealously protecting it against the claims of all others.  I may even turn to violence to protect what I see as mine and mine alone. 

But I’m still not happy with what I already have, so I greedily seek more and more, as I need to assure myself – who else is going to do it for me? – that I will have not only what I need, but all that I could possibly want.  In fact, I lose all distinction between wants and needs.  I think that whatever I want, I need.  I can easily rationalize that my “daily bread” costs at least half of that $300 million dollar lottery prize!

What a vain and greedy fool I become when I live in the land of I and me and my and mine.  I reject the kingdom of heaven to live in the vanity of hell. 

St. Paul reminds me that this is my old self, a self that I can put aside now that I have been raised in Christ.   I can put on a new self, a self abundantly filled with the love of Christ, a generous, joyful and serene self, a self that is wise enough to reject the hell of me and mine and accept the heaven of our almighty, all-loving, and all holy God.

God created me – as he created you and for each and every human being – with the free will to choose.  Jesus died for me – as he died for you and for each and every human being – that we would know that great love that we can choose to accept.  The Spirit lives in me, as he lives in you and in each and every human being, to give us the courage, strength and wisdom that we may choose to look to what is above rather than simply obsess on that which is below.

Created by God, redeemed by Christ, empowered by the Spirit, we choose love or hate, hope or despair, life or death, heaven or hell.  Pray for me, as I will certainly pray for you, that we always choose wisely.