Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

…one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

Our Lord Jesus Christ, as far as we know, owned nothing. Those of us who say He is our Savior and Exemplar need to think carefully about this. The perfect imitation of Christ is poverty. Few choose this road, but in the end, all of us become poor. Like the distracted landowner with his big building plans, tonight our life will be demanded and we shall possess nothing.

Just after I started to make notes on the subject, I heard something on the radio – a song by Larry Sparks – that put it in homely verse:

The last suit you wear won’t need any pockets,

You can’t take it with you when you go.

When this handful of dirt goes back in the earth,

What you’re worth only heaven will know.

What you’re worth only heaven will know. An allusion to the King James Version of this text, perhaps: a man’s worth is not to be counted by the abundance of his possessions. And to speak of “net worth” as a matter of money, as we commonly do, is to be as silly as that old fool in the parable.

The fact is, we possess nothing even in this life. Ownership is an illusion vanity as the great Preacher of Ecclesiastes put it (although I am told the Hebrew term he used was somewhat stronger – closer to excrement, in its connotation). Ownership is a legal fiction. When I say this is mine, I am speaking metaphorically. All that I mean is that I have control over the thing at the moment: for now, it is at my disposal. To imagine that the thing is a measure of my worth is ridiculous.

But we all do it, to some extent. The illusion has burrowed into our modern language. Not just net worth but the very word property. In modern English, my property is those things that I control for a while. This is significant because property originally meant something that was part of me, an aspect of my being, and the change in our usage exposes a profound, modern spiritual error. Because a property is something that defines a thing. Fluidity is a property of water. I am the sum-total of my properties, and to confuse them with my possessions is a big mistake. The fact that this confusion has crept into our language is significant, I think. It typifies a deformation of consciousness that is one of the dangers of modern times and our (temporarily) ascendant economic system, which completely ignores our Lord’s dictum and counts a person’s worth precisely according to the abundance of her possessions. And not even of his possessions, but of what he could sell them for. Life has a become money. This is the perfect opposite of Hebrew and Christian teaching. The Love of money is the root of all evil, says the Old Testament. And the Gospel calls Judas a lover of money.

Money and possession do symbolize relationships, and in a certain sense I am my relationships. Insofar as my relationships are characterized by love of God and neighbor ~ by self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice, in other words ~ I am on the right track. Insofar as they are otherwise, I am a sinner. The attempt to control, master, or tyrannize others ~ to possess them in any way ~ is the essence of sin. Really, the attempt to possess anything has the nature of sin. The ancient Church Fathers were very down on possession. The first time anyone said This is mine! Mine and not yours! That was the Fall. Adam’s sin was greater than Eve’s: at least she shared the forbidden fruit! But both of them reached out and grasped it and devoured it. Innocent enough, we seem to be born to grasp and devour, but this infantile taking and eating symbolizes greed. Beware of any kind of greed, says the New Adam. The ancient tradi0tion considers greed to be the very worst sin. Our whole life in the grace of the Spirit is progress in the practice of letting go, of loosening our grasp, of refusing to devour.

Now, it is possible to be very rich and at the same time NOT to be distracted by possessions, like the man in the parable. Andrew Carnegie is not a great hero of mine, but the old Scot had it right when he said that there was nothing more shameful than dying rich. And he didn’t. As a result, the country is littered with small-town libraries named after him. And his great charitable foundations still benefit humanity. Stern, Calvinist capitalism had a certain biblical realism about property: about, that is, the proper uses of accumulation. I am afraid present capitalism is pretty much cut loose from those moorings. Growth and accumulation is now an end in itself. The vanity of the Preacher and the foolishness of the man in the parable is now considered a virtue. Unfortunately, this is not only vain and foolish, it is unsustainable, delusional, and sinful.

Poverty, in the sense of detachment from possession and the refusal ever to think of possessions as my property is essential to spiritual life: the life we find only when we lose the life that measures its net worth according to the abundance of possessions. Which is vanity, and a striving after wind.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!