-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at www.usccb.org
-check out this week's LinC Letter at www.parishlincletter.blogspot.com
-I will be celebrating mass at Sat 4pm, and Sun 8am and 6pm
No Home Allowed
Two years after declaring that he was coming home and promising to bring a championship to his hometown, this past week LeBron James fulfilled that promise. At the celebrations of that victory this past week LeBron frequently reminded the crowds that he's "just a kid from Akron Ohio". Somebody very nicely made a video of all the kids that were at the parade on Wednesday and had them say the same line "I'm just a kid from…" but filling in their hometown.
As we know, there is "no place like home". I'm presuming that's why the teaching of the Scriptures today especially of Jesus in the Gospel is so hard for us to take. How can Jesus deny our attachment to home? But that's what he does. He holds himself out to his disciples as an example of one who does not have a home in this world. Where is his home? Well in the heavenly Jerusalem toward which he has resolutely set his sights.
I think this discussion of home and Jesus' discouragement from over attachment to our earthly home is an invitation for us to examine our priorities. Another teaching of Jesus comes to mind in this regard, "where your treasure lies so also your heart." Jesus is inviting us to follow him, to become his disciples, in fact to become his very voice hands face and heart for the world. That cannot happen as long as our deeper commitment is to family, self, comfort, satisfaction, and home.
This is radical teaching and it strikes at our natural over attachment to this world's treasure. Can we live in the world but be not of it? Can we be free to love others and the good projects and stuff of this world all as secondary to our love for God and our longing for heaven? It seems rather unnatural. But it is the invitation of Jesus and the call to conversion in our lives.
Can we, like Jesus, live and love in this world without dislocating our love for and desire for eternal life, life with God, life in heaven? Is there any detachment from our earthly and worldly "home" that allows for a deeper and more profound love of God and eternal life?
1 comment:
I love the honesty and the naming of reality in the Matador's reflection this week. "Our natural over attachment to this world's treasure", "free to love others and the good stuff of this world all as secondary to our love for God"... Those statements name some of the true challenge of being a "perfect" disciple.
Jesus calls us to sacrificial love, giving ourselves away for the good of the other...but you, Matador, remind us that this Scripture teaches us that all of that is within the realm of healthy detachment. It is a difficult balance and part of the cost of discipleship. The closest I can come in thinking of it in my own life is when my children were growing up and becoming independent. As a parent I continued to love them very deeply, but I knew that I also needed to WANT them to grow away from me, in a manner of speaking.
I think that same idea can apply to all of the kinds of our loving. It takes on a different look with spouses and friends, of course. But there is that idea that we need to love each other deeply while REALLY wanting each person (including ourselves) to find their way to an even more intimate and closer relationship with God. It's great food for thought.
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