Treasures in heaven

June 20, 2014
Friday 11th Week in
Ordinary Time
1st Reading: 2 Kgs 11:1-4, 9-18, 20
Gospel: Mt 6:19–23

Jesus said to his disciples, “Do not store up treasure for yourself here on earth where moth and rust destroy it, and where thieves can steal it. Store up treasure for yourself with God, where no moth or rust can destroy nor thief come and steal it.
“For where your treasure is, there also your heart will be.

“The lamp of the body is the eye; if your eyes are sound, your whole body will be in the light. If your eyes are diseased your whole body will be in darkness. Then, if your light has become darkness, how dark will be the darkest part of you!”

D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)

If possessing very few things is misery, are we better off owning so many? “If a man owns land,” wrote Thomas Drummond (Letter, 1838), “the land owns him.” Russell Baker said it in another way when he wrote in New York Times the following: “The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and to defeat him ultimately.” Material things are destructive to a person not because they are bad in themselves but because their desirability lures him into submission till he becomes the possession of these possessions.

Call it subtle slavery. Even as he is already enslaved he thinks he is still the master simply because he can do anything with what he possesses. Arthur Young observes in his Travels in France: “Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years’ lease of a garden and he will convert it into a desert.” Yet even as a person appears the master of what he has, slavery cuts deeper into his being. He spends a lifetime working for wealth, often at the cost of relationships and spirituality. He stops only when he can no longer work because it is time to die, and dies bringing nothing with him beyond the grave. What worse slavery is there than that?

While we need money, today’s Gospel raises our awareness that life is worth more. What about knowledge, virtue and spirituality? These in fact are what we can take with us beyond the grave. With knowledge we understand the world more and appreciate better its Creator. With virtues such as the virtue of piety we free ourselves from the perils of an un-meditated life. With profound spirituality, we work like everything depended on God but pray like everything depended on us.

Owning nothing is misery but it’s really worse owning many if we neglect the realm of spirituality. At the end of our lives what matters is not how much we have accumulated but how deep we have cultivated. – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: [email protected]. Website: www.frdan.org.

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