Spirituality of the Readings
My Own Heart
Here is the question we will look at this week: what is life about?
Many times has this been asked! Let us look at Christ’s answer.
According to the First Reading:
Deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans. The body weighs down the soul, the earth weighs down the mind. … What is within our grasp we find with difficulty.
Sounds like the writer was having a bad day. But these words actually do apply to all life. We have choices, we have problems. What are we to do?
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
This is the Serenity Prayer, well-known, possibly trite to some people. But it shows us the essence of humility: be who you are, not more, not less. Trust in God for everything you cannot do. Let go, let God.
So, there I find a first answer. Life here on earth, even though timid and weighed down, is about humility.
The second answer is love. Real, toiling, sweating love.
Look at the apostle Paul in the Second Reading—the fiery, tempestuous Paul—now an old man and in prison. We are reading a personal letter here, one he wrote to Philemon. It turns out that Philemon’s slave Onesimus ran away and came to Paul in in his jail cell. Paul became like a father to him, converted him to Christianity and now sends him back to Philemon not as a slave but “as a man and in the Lord.”
Listen to the language Paul uses. “I am sending him, that is, [I am sending] my own heart, back to you.” Onesimus is not a servant anymore. Paul is sending someone so dear to him that he refers to that man as “his own heart.”
This is true personal love. It is what life here on earth is all about.
The third answer, as the Gospel tells us, is to get our values straight. Jesus says he wants you to
1. hate your father, mother, children, brothers, sisters,
and your own life,
2. renounce all your possessions,
3. carry your own cross just as he carries his.
Hang on, don’t panic. These sound horrible, but examine them.
1. The word “hate” is probably an oratorical way to say “love them in proportion.” If you let love of God be first in your life, your beloved family will come right along with it. If you do not, you will lose them. Hate means not having them be overboard in their importance to you.
2. “Renounce all your possessions.” If you are tempted to love material things above all else, then renounce them. It is God you need to love above all things, and everything else only in proportion.
3. Why are we supposed to carry a cross? Because it is far too easy for us to pretend that the world is not really painful, that no one actually suffers. But they do and we do, in a big way. Taking up our cross sends us out with Jesus to help others carry theirs.
And that is the real and final answer to the problems presented in the First Reading. What is life about here on earth? It is about being humble, about loving others truly, and about loving God above all things.
If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
John Foley, SJ
**From Saint Louis University