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TRAVEL LIGHT
“He
said to them, "Take nothing for the journey ...”
(Saint Luke 9.3)
We
are wanting in nothing, except faith.
Of course we trust in God, but we are appalled at His
treatment of His friends, His Saints. Look at St. Paul himself:
“Even unto this hour we both hunger and
thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no fixed abode;
... we are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer
it. We are blasphemed, and we entreat; we are made as the refuse of
this world, the off-scouring of all even until now.”
(I Corinthians 4.11-13)
Somehow we have lost something in the
translation.
Jesus told us that who would follow Him on the journey must
“take up his cross”.
Not his cell phone, or her PDA, or laptop, extra clothing and, oh
yes, the extra twenty dollars ... “just in case” — in
short, all the things of this world that you cannot carry into the
next. This leaves you with decidedly little for the journey, and if
we look at St. Paul and the Saints, it is decidedly not an easy or
comfortable one.
Who told you it would be?
This is perplexing.
Somehow we have translated faith into warm blankets, secure shelter,
respectable clothing, adequate money, abundant food, and being
well-received (after all, we
are ambassadors of Christ. Okay, so they did not
receive Him terribly well two thousand years ago, but times have
changed ... especially if you are a “professional”
Catholic: you know, one who earns a salary selling to
others what was freely given to you) ... and, “oh, yes,
would you place that cross on the baggage trolley, too?”
Christ is the Wisdom of God. He knows that we have to travel light
and despite all our clutching, have to let go of the money we earned
preaching the Gospel in the much in the way that the Sophist
Protagoras*
taught “virtue”.
It can’t pass through the Needle’s Eye.
What is worse, if it is bound to you too tightly ... neither will
you ...
Travel
light
You must look at all about you and say, with
Christ,
“Where I am going, you cannot
follow.”
Geoffrey K.
Mondello
for the Boston Catholic Journal
_____________________________________________
* Socrates antagonist in Plato’s Dialogue, “Protagoras”
Printable PDF Version
Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti
verbum Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and yet
you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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