In my office I display an assortment of snow globes from various parts of the world and there is a story behind the collection. In college, I became the godparent for a classmate who joined the Catholic Church. Later, she became a family friend. When she traveled, she would send us postcards. When I traveled to new locations, I would get her a snow globe in turn. But four years ago, she died as a result of an unsuccessful heart surgery. In her will, she left me the snow globes, so now the gifts I had found during my travels are back in my possession.
Nor is this the only time that things I had given to others came back to me because of their passing. Gifts for my Dad, Mom, and my Aunt Gizi (a holy water bottle from Lourdes, a decorative Virgin Mary plate from Medjugorje, and an icon of a Hungarian saint) had all come back to me after their deaths. All of these objects remind me of the stark reality highlighted by the title of an American play - You Can't Take It With You.
The Gospel reading for this Sunday discusses how we will lose all of our possessions from one moment to the next when we die. The time will come when we must leave everything we own behind. People will sometimes choose to be buried with precious objects or memorabilia, but these too will simply corrode and decay in the earth. They will not accompany us to the great beyond.
On the one hand, possessions can help us in life. They can also be helpful gifts to leave to our heirs or to charitable institutions. But everything we own today will one day be destroyed. The homes we have labored to purchase and maintain will one day fall apart. The cars we were delighted to drive will one day be junk. Our electronics will become obsolete. Our beautiful dishes will break to pieces. Nothing will remain of the objects we cherish.
True, some incredible architectural achievements of humanity have survived for centuries and even millennia. But these too will be destroyed one day. Even the land on which they stand will in time disappear as the earth changes.
Perhaps this reflection seems a bit depressing. But all generations of humanity have grappled with such thoughts. Some have sought solace in hedonism, trying to extract as much pleasure as they can from this world before the curtain falls. Others have tried enjoying the beauty of each moment of life, to the extent possible, without thinking ahead.
But Christianity offers a very different answer. Christianity offers Christ, who is God himself, God Incarnate, who came among us to lift us out of our sinful brokenness and to invite us into an eternal life of endless, boundless peace, joy, and fulfillment. Yes, the things of our material world will fall away. We will lose all of our possessions. But instead, an eternal life of infinite love awaits us if we embrace Christ.
The goal of life is not to accumulate and possess things but to accept Christ's love and to love him with our whole heart in return. Owning things is not wrong in and of itself. The problem is when our love of things draws us away from Christ. We should see our possessions not as ends in themselves, as things that can make us happy, but as tools that help us live in this world and gifts that we can give to others to help them. We should live our lives with a sense of spiritual detachment from the things that we own and from all of the material world so that we can truly free our souls to be united with Christ. When we are genuinely imbued with the love of Christ, all other things fall into place as well. We will then love others and all created things with a healthy, well-ordered love.
In the Second Reading, taken from St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians, we see the Apostle continue his reflection on the centrality of Christ. He highlights a number of factors that can bind us and hold us back from his grace. In addition to idolatrous greed, he lists immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and lying. Immorality and impurity constitute a form of idolatry, seeking physical pleasure in a way that contradicts God's design and mars our humanity. Passion, like possessions, is not evil in and of itself, but when we are ruled by our passions, we prevent God's love from directing our actions. Needless to say, evil desire sets us at odds with God, who is infinite goodness and who desires the good of all of his creation. Lying too puts a wedge between us and God, since God is the ultimate truth. Interestingly, as St. Paul presents his list, he does not indicate that one factor is worse or more serious than the others. His list suggests that all these are equally dangerous for our spiritual well-being.
As discussed, our spiritual health requires that we detach ourselves form our earthly possessions, since we cannot take them with us when we die. But there is much from this life that we can and will take with us. When our body dies, our soul will live on in the afterlife and will in time reunite with our physical body in the resurrection. The state our soul is in when we transition to the world beyond is what we will take with us. If we have filled our soul with hatred, with evil, then we will have an existence bound by evil in the next life. But if we have allowed Christ to fill our soul with his love then when we die, we will live eternally in his love. The choice is ours. Let us, therefore, focus on the only good thing we can take with us into eternity - Christ's love dwelling in our soul, helping us to love all others.
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The readings for Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C are:
Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23
Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14 and 17
Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11
Luke 12:13-21
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Ruins of the Forum Romanum in Rome, once the center of the known world by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2012.