June 19
Our Lady of the Monte Senario
Weekday in Ordinary Time
Optional Memorial: St. Romuald,
Abbot
Today's Gospel: Matthew 6:19-23
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| Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. |
Jesus made it very simple.
Do not store up treasures on
earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. Store up
treasures in heaven instead. And then He said the line that explains everything:
For where your treasure is
there your heart will be also.
In life your treasures lead,
and your heart follows. Which means if you want to know where your heart
actually is, not where you think it is, not where you'd like it to be, instead look
at what you're holding onto. Look at what you can't let go of. That will tell
you everything you need to know about what you deem as treasure in your life.
The eye is the lamp of the
body. What you look at shapes what you become. A healthy eye, one fixed consistently
on eternal things, fills the whole body with light. An eye fixed on the accumulation of money and wealth, or on the endless acquiring of things that
rust and fade, that eye fills everything with a darkness so familiar you stop
noticing it's there.
St. Romuald walked away from
a nobleman's inheritance and spent his life building monasteries and hermitages,
places stripped of everything unnecessary and worldly so that God could fill
the space. He understood that the less you carry the faster you can run. I like
that. And the Barnabites who would come five centuries after him had the same
instinct: "You must run like mad! Run towards God and towards
others!". You cannot run like mad while dragging the weight of
everything you've accumulated behind you. Yes, even your wealth, the maintenance
and managing, and worrying about it, takes your eyes and your heart off Jesus.
Back in the 1980’s, I gave my banjo away. I really loved
that banjo; the sound of it was amazing, the feel of holding it, my dream to
continue playing bluegrass was built around it. A friend of mine, John, an older
man, used to talk about how he wished he had learned to play banjo somewhere
along the way in his life. One day, the Lord led my heart to just give it to
him. All of it, the banjo, the sheet music, the instruction books, everything.
He didn't want to take it at first. He knew how much I loved it. I told him how
I felt that the Lord led my heart to do this for you. That was over forty years
ago. I still remember giving it away more clearly than anything I ever kept.
That's how treasure in heaven works. The things we release filled with love
never really leave us. They just do good elsewhere.
Our Lady owned almost
nothing. A small home in Nazareth. Simple clothes. Whatever a carpenter's wife
kept in a modest household in first-century Palestine. And yet she is the most
treasured woman in all of human history. Heaven has been talking about her for
two thousand years. She stored up exactly the right kind of treasure.
Something to sit with today:
Everything you own quietly
asks something of you, your time, your worry, your heart. A new possession
rarely stays new for long; it becomes a chain dressed up as a blessing. Jesus
did not say it would be hard for the rich to enter the kingdom; He said it
would be like threading a camel through the eye of a needle. That is not a
warning only to the wealthy alone. That is a warning to anyone whose hands are
too full to reach for Jesus, or to pray or to do something for someone else.
Hold everything loosely.
The tighter your grip on what you own, the harder it is to open your hands in
prayer. Nothing on this earth is worth the cost of a distracted heart. Jesus is
not asking for what is left over after the mortgage, the car, the comfort, the
convenience. He is asking for everything. And only when He has everything will
you finally understand that He was always enough.
What is one thing in your
life right now that quietly demands more of your heart and your time than Jesus
does?
Rosary Man Jim 🌹
Freely given. Freely shared.
