Hold Everything Loosely
Paul tells married men to live as though they had no wives, and buyers to act as though they owned nothing. Jesus calls the poor blessed and pronounces a woe over the rich, the well fed and the popular. Read quickly, it sounds like the Gospel wants you miserable.
Read it again and something else surfaces. Neither of them says a word against wives, food, laughter or a good name. Both go after the grip. The form of this world is passing away, and the human heart keeps clutching it as though it were the last word. You can be poor and clutch. You can be rich and hold loosely. The readings ask which one you are doing right now.
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One man who did it
Saint Peter Claver sailed for Cartagena in 1610 knowing he would never see home again, signed his final vows slave of the Africans forever, and spent forty years climbing down into the holds of slave ships with medicine, bread and interpreters. Ten thousand people a year came through that port, and a third of them died on the crossing. He could not end the trade. What he could do was tell people who had been handled as cargo that God had given them a dignity nobody could sell.
The magistrates resented him for most of his life. Then he spent four years sick and largely neglected, died in September 1654, and the same magistrates buried him at public expense. Hated, excluded, reviled, and at the very end spoken well of. He had leaped for joy long before.
Read the full reflection, with the Greek and the sources →
Written by Deacon Dan DeLuca, a permanent deacon ordained for the Archdiocese of Omaha in 2023, completing a master’s degree in theology. Everything here is written by him, and every claim is cited to the document it comes from, by paragraph number, so you can check it.