Reflection
At the local YMCA, where I exercise several times a week, I recently met a man in his late 30s or early 40s who told me he was a retired police officer. When I inquired how he was spending his retirement, he said in all seriousness, “I am buying houses and fixing them up. It is part of my plan to be a billionaire.”
Before we departed, I wished him well. But I was left wondering if being a billionaire was really what his deepest self was after. We didn’t delve into the motivation for his goal. Maybe he wanted to make enough money to support scholarships for poor children or build homes for struggling families. Or maybe he just wanted the prestige, power, and creature comforts that wealth can bring.
Meeting him reminded me of a quote by my fellow Kentuckian, Trappist monk Thomas Merton:
“People may spend their entire lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
None of us is ever absolutely sure our ladder is leaning against the wall that is in our best interests. But many keep climbing anyway.
Our consumer-focused, entertainment-dominant culture can easily shape our life agendas. We, without realizing it, worship the gods of money, power, and status because the culture endorses it. Our energies and time end up being forms of submitting to these false gods. In doing so, our deeper, spiritual cores gradually experience neglect and, like a potted plant on the windowsill left without water and fertilizer, eventually die.
Today’s first reading from Hosea, written over 700 years before Christ, is a clear warning about neglect of our divine cores. Using the image of a bride and groom, the writer calls the people of Israel to live “. . . in right and in justice, in love and in mercy.”
Israel’s infidelity at the time was in worshiping false gods and in the cruel oppression of the poor. Love and humility mark the person dependent on a loving God for everything.
In the end, only this loving God can provide what we need to fill our deepest longings.
There are many examples of men and women whose ladder was leaning against the wrong wall, but shifted to a different wall. They recognized the error of their ways only to descend and shift to a wall that gave them the consolation of living their authentic self, a self totally dependent on God.
John Newton in the mid 1700s shamelessly transported slaves from Africa in horrific conditions. He was awakened to his shallow life when his ship nearly sank in a fierce storm. Gradually, he moved to a life of penance, becoming an Anglican priest and penning the magnificent hymn, “Amazing Grace,” which poetically summarized his total dependence on God.
Thomas Merton, whose hedonistic life as a young man resulted in fathering a child outside marriage, nearly failing in school, and sinking into confusion. Over time, he was drawn into the Catholic Church and eventually became a monk, priest, and remarkable spiritual writer.
Dorothy Day, the twentieth-century American prophetess, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement after being a Communist, having an abortion, and living an indulgent life in Greenwich Village in New York City, is being considered for canonization in Rome.
In each of our own lives there are aspects that need conversion like these three remarkable disciples. We cling to some false god and fear letting go. It may be a weak area of an overall life lived for God that we just can’t shake. It may be a career course or way of living that, upon prayerful reflection, we know fails to satisfy us.
These false gods need to be expelled and we need healing. Only grace will get us where we long to be.
Just as Jesus in today’s Gospel goes from one broken person to another, healing each along the way, so we can turn to him and just touch his cloak. He tells us, “Your faith has saved you.” Thus, we are healed and shift the ladder to the wall we, and God, really want to lean on.
