Ron Rolheiser writes about his leaving home to enter the seminary at age seventeen. “Everything I owned in the world fit into one medium-sized suitcase (and it wasn’t full). Now I can’t go for even a week carrying so little. From a certain point onward in our lives we begin to accumulate things, often without really realizing it.” Today’s theme from Luke’s Gospel speaks to the Lord’s call to detach ourseleves completely from the attachment of things that possess us that are not of the Lord.
The first thing that generates surplus baggage in our lives is our grandiosity. It feeds off our achievements, successes, ambitions daydreams, and the recognition we receive in life. Next come our wounds – the hurts, resentments, and rejections that we have suffered through the years. Then there are our sexual fantasies, our imaginings (both noble and coarse) of consummation, of sexual fulfillment, of physical and emotional ecstasy. Then there is the psychological bric-a-brac of our lives: our television sitcoms, the sports scores, the talk shows, and the current gossip and humour about the celebrities in the culture. Any extra space inside ourselves is crammed with these. Finally there is health and life itself. To ensure these, we have, literally, cabinets full of medicines, vitamins, and cosmetics, along with a basement full of exercise equipment – matching all kinds of internal baggage we have stored as a resource to insure health, youth, attractiveness, and life.
Like the rooms in our houses, every day that we live, our internal rooms too fill up with more and more stuff – valuable things, toxic things, and junk. It challenges our ability to “center life” around the Lord – having but one priority each day to start and end that day doing His will. Julian of Norwich states that we will cling to God only when we no longer cling to everything else. Robert Barron writes that in many ways, everything else in your life becomes secondary, is commentary. When the Lord Jesus Christ gets into your boat, he will always lead you to the depths. Rohr expresses this idea: As we get older, he submits, the real task of life, both in terms of human growth and life in God, is to begin to shed things, to carry less and less baggage, to slim-down spiritually and psychologically to match the meagerness of the possessions we had when we were seventeen years old and could still put all we own into one little suitcase. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I go back again. The Lord gives and the Lord takes. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Shedding Things” July 1998