Today’s readings: Ecclesiastes 1,2; 2, 21-23; Colossians 3, 1-5. 9-11; Lk. 12, 13-21.
Scripture does not offer definitive statements or dogmatic truths about life. It provides a map, orientation, a sense of place and of how things relate to each other and to life’s worth. It is meant to prompt reflection, not block thinking; to start the in-depth conversation we need to hold with ourselves and with others.
When Socrates said that the unconsidered life is not worth living, he meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. Today’s Scripture readings, particularly the first from Ecclesiastes and the one from Luke’s gospel, far from moralising, prompt us to intellectual honesty, integrity and truth as the values that make life authentic.
The gospel teaches a lesson of dispossession and detachment. As Peter Kreeft writes, avarice is not desire, or even desire for temporal possessions, but an immoderate desire for them. Avarice makes things we desire into ends or gods. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, writes, the meaning of things lies not in themselves, but in our attitude to them. This is Jesus’ warning in today’s gospel.
Throughout the gospel Jesus spoke about avarice more than about any other sin. Christian tradition ranks it ahead of lust and second only to pride. On a deeper level, avarice is lack of wisdom, foolishness; it reduces life to vanity, according to the first reading. It assumes that happiness comes from possessing.
As we read today through the first reading that “all is vanity”, and that “a man who has laboured wisely, skillfully and successfully must leave what is his own to someone who has not toiled for it at all”, a sense of hopelessness crosses our mind, a huge delusion weighs down on our heart, marking life with a deep feeling of emptiness. Vanity is a condition in which we may find ourselves. It robs life of any sense of purpose, and it is the cause of spiritual suffering. It is also a mood, with neither a reason to die, nor a reason to live.
Last Sunday’s leader of this newspaper argued that on the issue of ‘assisted dying’, or ‘dying with dignity’, doctors’ only guidance now is their religion or philosophy of life. “Indeed,” it added, “if a full-blown national debate on this subject is to follow, compassion and understanding should be among its guiding values”. There is no doubt that compassion and understanding are pivotal in any debate whatsoever that touches people’s lives and the sense of living. But I believe there should be much more that that.
Our post-modern society is constantly engaged in debates about charged topics and where, unfortunately, religion is gradually becoming an unmentionable. True, the Church itself acknowledges that it is no longer in a position of power to determine the outcome of such debates in what commonly we hold to be a post-Christian society.
Yet, for truth’s sake, we still need sure points of reference to recover the common ground that would bridge the abyss between our conflicting perspectives. It’s something of a misnomer to think of religion merely as a set of absolute truths that eventually blocks, indeed prohibits, a full-blown debate. Rupert Shortt is right when he warns, in his book God is No Thing, that nowadays hardline secularism resembles more a dogmatic religion. Daniel Dennett has gone so far as to suggest that atheists should be called ‘brights’, to distinguish them from religious believers.
Unfortunately we ourselves are to some extent to blame that for too long our arguments from religion were exclusively in terms of absolutes, and to quite an extent ignored the role of human experience as vital in any argumentation whatsoever. The Scriptures, though, correct this misconception and put us in the right perspective. In Colossians, St Paul speaks of stripping off our old self to put on the true self “which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator”.
Religion is not about abstract thinking or about stories we tell ourselves to avoid reality. Among other things, it stands for a tradition of wisdom we would do well not to ignore.