Day: October 21, 2012

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Where are our hearts? What do we want, really and truly? Do we want what is really and truly to be wanted? Do we know what that might be?

We do and we don’t. What is really and truly to be wanted is the “Father’s good pleasure” bestowed through the good virtue of the Mother: the good pleasure of our heavenly Father; the good virtue of Mother Church. But we are all caught, in one way or another, in the ambiguity of our desiring.

There is our wanting, first, this thing and, then, that thing, each with an absolute desire, only to discover that no one thing can really satisfy. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee,” Augustine said long ago, or as Mick Jagger put it somewhat more recently, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The double negative is simply part of the double-sidedness of our desiring. We don’t know what we want – is it this or is it that? – because we don’t know what is really and truly to be wanted. Jesus calls this condition of ours, “anxiety”– at least that is the modern English word, at least since the seventeenth century for the state of our distractedness. We are distracted because we are literally “divided in our minds.” How much more so in what Alan Jacobs has called “the age of distraction”?

It is a powerful image really. Our eyes flit quickly from one object to another unable to focus on any one thing. We are distracted and often beside ourselves; in short, divided in our souls. Against this, Jesus, in Luke’s account, would gently recall us to ourselves. He would recall us to what is really and truly to be wanted in which everything else must find its place. He gently but firmly reminds us of the Providence of God, of God’s providential care for us. God sees all things in his single-minded love for us.

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“Everything is ready”

“Everything is ready”, it seems, but are we?  What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? What, indeed, is the wedding-garment without which, it seems, we are not ready; without which, it seems, we are out even when we think we are in; without which, it seems, we shall be “cast into outer darkness”  where  “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”?

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them, though, no doubt, that raises the larger question about the struggle for the good in our lives. But the point, surely, is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question for Christians “at all times and in all places” is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace.  By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us. “Wherefore,” St. Paul bids us, “be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

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