Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102212.cfm

Stone age seating

Take care to guard against all greed, 
for though one may be rich, 
one's life does not consist of possessions.




Some unknown person who may not have enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame once said, "He who dies with the most toys wins!"

Was he serious? Probably not. But perhaps this unknown person felt the gates of hell closing around him and believed there was no escape.

The quip sounds like another popular mot, "The difference between the men and the boys is the size of their toys." I first read that remark outside a pleasure boat dealership. If it had a slightly demonic ring to it, the merchants weren't particularly concerned. They knew their target market. If either sales pitch might encounter some resistance from the consumer's angel of conscience -- the one who sits on your right shoulder -- the imp on the left shoulder would carry the day.

If you even half-believe either remark, or thousands like it, you're probably American. It's bred into us from the day we first sat on Santa Claus's lap and shyly read our hopeful list. It was further encouraged when we saw the pile of toys around the Christmas tree and checked them off, one by one, against the list.

Perhaps someone spoke to us on that Christmas morning and reminded us that the reason for the season is not actually the gifts of the magi, but the Gift to the magi, an Infant in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. And perhaps we forgot for a moment the toys and worshiped the Child.

This is a hard message to learn: I am not what I own. Nor, for that matter, am I what I control, or what I think. I am not the responsibilities I manage nor the diplomas on my wall. Nor am I a list books I have read, places I have been or friends I claim. I am not even the reflection in my mirror.

Saint Francis taught his friars to live sine proprio. It's translated as "without property" but he meant far more than that. Francis would not count the disciples who flocked to him, the experts who consulted him or the crowds who heard him speak. He disowned even the ecstatic moments which God gave to him, and carefully hid his debilitating stigmata.

He wanted nothing, which is the Emptiness of God, who is the Creator of All Things and, it follows, not a Thing. A nothing. He wanted to be emptied into Nothingness. There he hoped to find God. For that reason he demanded that his friars lay his dying, naked body on the bare earth of the ground. (He had to accept a compromise with that demand; there were women present.)

Francis wanted to die as Jesus died.

Here we are in mid-October. Christmas is coming. Can we imagine a Yuletide without greed, without possessions? Can I hope to defy the world around me, and die with nothing?