IS IT TRUE AND UNFAIR OR JUST PLAIN TRUE?

 

GIVEN AT THE LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR 9-25-2023

Pay attention to how you hear: to the one who has, more will be given; and one who has not, will lose even the little he thinks he has.

Luke 8:16-18

This odd little gospel may sound at first like a social justice complaint, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” That’s exactly what it says, but it means that there is a profound truth, a universal law, behind its shocking words. “The one who has will get more and the one who has not will lose what he has.” 

The person who is physically fit and keeps himself so will be able to lift more weight, run farther and feel better all around, while the one who lets himself go flabby, will be able to lift less weight, not be able to run as far or as fast and will probably have more things like diabetes or high blood pressure.

The person who saves some of his money and invests it wisely will become richer, while the one who is a spendthrift and wastes his money on gambling and unwise purchases will probably end up losing whatever he has.

The person who has faith and feeds that faith with regular prayer and spiritual reading will end up with an even stronger faith, while the one with little faith, who skips church, skips prayer and skips any spiritual reading will, no doubt, lose what little faith he had! 

Maybe we could summarize the great truth behind the passage today, “The one who has will get more and the one who has not will lost what he has,” these two popular phrases - “Choose it or lose it.” or “If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.”

Winston Churchill said, “Nothing gets better by leaving it alone.” In fact, when we “leave things alone” the natural process of entropy sets in – we start coming unglued, we start declining, we begin to rot!  Entropy is that spontaneous and unremitting tendency in the universe toward disorder unless there is an opposing force working against it. People, like homes, when they are left alone fall into decay. Even fruits and vegetables, unless something is done to “preserve” them, begin to rot! When we “leave ourselves alone,” we commit what I call “personal and spiritual suicide.”

I have concluded that there are two secret ingredients to becoming all that we can be. (1) The first ingredient is a passionate commitment to personal excellence – to loving who we really are – loving ourselves enough to care about becoming our best selves. Really loving oneself does not mean papering oneself. Rather, it means doing hard things for one’s own good.

(2) After a passionate commitment to who one is, to being the best version of ourselves, the second ingredient in really loving oneself is a passionate commitment to vocational excellence.  If you strive to be the best at what you have been called to do in life, you will get better at it. If you choose the “good enough to get by” path, you will become known for your mediocrity. 

The word used by fourth century monks for this state was acedia. Acedia is not a disease, it’s a temptation – the temptation to disconnect, the temptation to stop caring, the temptation to stop making an effort. I find it fascinating that acedia, in its root, means negligence - a negligence that leads to a state of listlessness, a lack of attention to daily tasks and an overall dissatisfaction with life, of not caring or not being concerned with one’s self-care or position or condition in the world. In other words, unlike clinical depression, it can be resisted. The sooner it is confronted the more success one has in turning it around.