Hi Everyone,
Updates:
1. I celebrated Mass today for all those who die without a funeral Mass, and for all of you, the parishioners.
2. Bustopher Jones has lost another 4 ounces or so this week, so his health continues to improve.
3. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'm going to do the first installment of what I'll call "Through Saints' Eyes." My idea is to live-stream (from the parish facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ourladyvt/) a time of devotion, teaching, and preaching, relying on texts from the saints. So the idea is to give an overview of the saint that day, read something from his works, perhaps a snippet of a sermon or devotional work, and then close with a period of prayer. For timing I'm thinking about half an hour, perhaps a little less. Start time tomorrow will be 6:30; I'll start the live-stream at 6:25 or so. Hope you can join! The saintly focus will be St. Anselm.
Reflection
http://cms.usccb.org/bible/readings/042120.cfm
The liturgy continues marching through the book of Acts, this time describing the communal living of the early Christians. What was their fundamental approach to possessions? They had everything in common. Their communal living for them applied quite literally. The reading speaks later on of Barnabas selling a piece of his property and emptying out the proceeds to the Apostles. We do not have simply charitable giving, but complete pooling of funds and resources. This model of life has been preserved in monastic communities down the centuries, functioning as a great aid to virtue.
The exterior way of life reflects an interior vision that the early Christians had. If I had to pick one word to describe it, I would call it solidarity. That is, their point of departure for using material goods was that they were all one family. It was not a question of satisfying your own needs and then seeing how much you could spare for your neighbor; rather, the approach was that everyone had an equal claim on the resources of all. If resources were scarce, then all would suffer the loss; if they were abundant, all would enjoy the bounty.
This interior dimension is important, because it points the way to our imitating the Apostles and the early Christians. Even if the literal pooling of all our resources is not feasible, the interior dimension is still accessible. Even if we cannot live monastic lives, we must still cultivate monastic hearts: hearts in love with poverty, chastity, and obedience. Hearts that love solidarity. Hearts that love our neighbors as ourselves.
One of my favorite quotes of St. Ambrose gets at this interior quality of solidarity. He says, If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you, the other belongs to the man with no shirt. St. Augustine says a similar things: The extravagance of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you have possessions in excess, you possess what belongs to others. Both great saints speak from the same interior vision that humankind is a community, and the material goods belong to the whole community. Particular members of the community must use, purpose, and distribute those goods for the well-being of the community, not simply their own good. The material goods of the world are not meant to be amassed in single possessors. The excesses of some are the necessity of others.
Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way: Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor. I like his quote less, because it sounds as though you start with yourself, and then give what is left over, as opposed to beginning with care for the whole community, and seeing yourself as a custodian for the community's goods. Still, it drives home the point that the only possessions we could really rightly use are those required by necessity and propriety.
As we consider how to achieve this standard, what advice might we consider? Here is the advice of C. S. Lewis.
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.
I love that line give more than we can spare. Our giving cannot just skim off the top, giving only once all our own desires are met. That would be to fail at that interior vision that sees everyone in solidarity as children of God.
May we have the courage to imitate the Apostolic church in radical freedom from the care and acquisitiveness of this world in order to secure the next. And we might keep in mind the words of Francis Cardinal George to a group of rich donors of his diocese: "the poor need you to stay out of poverty, but you need the poor to stay out of Hell."
God bless you all!
Fr. Rensch