WHAT TRULY MATTERS

V/​ I will turn to you O God, 

R/​ to God who gives joy to my youth

V/​ Give me the Wisdom that sits by your throne; 

R/ that I may be counted among your children

Lord, in your all-providential plan, you have led me to this moment to rediscover me in your Word and Wisdom. Aid me to make this time of meditation and prayer enriching, transforming, and liberating for my well-being and others. Amen!

THE ART OF WHAT TRULY MATTERS

By Lucinda M. Vardey

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2: 21-23; Psalm 49: 1-12; Colossians 3: 1-1; Luke 12: 13-21

Sunday 3rd August 2025

Most Prophets reveal God as maternal, whose compassion grows warm and tender towards Israel, like a son.  God’s children are to be taken up into God’s arms and embraced from their vanities, from violence, from distractions that are inappropriate for children steadfastly loved by God. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux mastered this kind of spiritual childhood and showed us how to be truly child-like in our relationship with our parent God.  Just as children, when hungry and thirsty, we need only to cry to the Lord, and God satisfies us and fills us with “good things.”

     How difficult it is to be like a child and receive this spiritual nourishment and care from our God!  It is common to believe that we have to toil for God’s attention, as if unworthy to participate in God’s love freely.  This toil we are told in the Ecclesiastes readings is vanity, where we busy ourselves trying to work out God in our minds, or do certain things we think will make us worthy of God’s love.  “Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice,” wrote Saint Thérèse, “but in a disposition of the heart, which makes us humble and little in the arms of God.”

     Jesus came to calm us and direct us on how to be children of God.  He, the Son, God, his Father.  What he taught should ease our confusion and our fears. He told us that God looks upon the heart, and showed us with stories and parables how we can more fully understand and act as children of God. Jesus has the answers; there is no need to look elsewhere.  Paul reminds us that life with Christ is new. By setting our minds not on things of the earth but on things that are above, we are stripped of the old ways and are renewed.

     Storing up material possessions for ourselves in the earthly life is clearly not the way for a child of God.  All the scripture readings for this day point to this same message. The emphasis, instead, is on the soul. Jesus relates in the Gospel that we do not know what our future holds, nor do we know how long we will live.  Recently, while talking with a friend about his inheritance, he mentioned that after reading a book called Dying with Zero, he decided not to store up treasures in “barns” but to donate his investments to the needs of immigrants while he was still alive.  An immigrant himself, he wanted to help those undergoing difficulties in a new country.  “The things you have prepared, whose will they be?” alerts us to not hold on, nor even desire our future, or the future of others, but to be rich towards God as much as possible today.

     Dying with Zero could also be embraced as an interior action of the soul, an intention and aim for total surrender of self into a hidden life in God.  French Carmelite, Marie Aimée de Jésus (who died the year after Saint Thérèse was born) wrote in a prayer she entitled The Hidden Life in God, “Hide me forever in your divine shadow, hide me well in you Adorable Invisible One!  Within your arms, my All, a secret fire may pierce me, Happy to see you, proud to be naught…Incline O night, the benefits of your shadows: Blessed forgetfulness, my grandeur, be my tomb.  May only You, my dearest delight, be admired as only You are God!  And only you are beautiful!  If life is sweet in a little corner, a corner of shadows is a good place to die!  Abandoned there, a useless thing, mute, unknown to self, diminished every day, keeping quiet in soul amid contempt, who would not do this for you, my Love?  Being out of the way without appearing thus, seeking only to acquiesce, simply receiving the Master’s caress, an erased oblation everywhere!”