Do You See the Treasures Around You?

The Good News for the Day, June 22, 2024

Saturday in the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time (369)

Jesus says to his friends and followers: “Don’t accumulate for yourselves valuables on this transient earth, where moth and rot destroy such things — where thieves break into your house and take them.

No, store your valuables in the realm of what is right – the kingdom of heaven —where no moth or rot destroys them, where no thieves break in to steal them. Wherever you keep your real valuables—that is where your heart is, too.

The flashlight of the body is your eye. If your eye is working well, your whole living body will be filled with what the light illuminates. If your eye is in bad shape, your whole living body will become more and more unenlightened.

If the light inside you is not radiant, how great will the darkness be.” (Matthew 6)

Both experience and psychologists remind us that we see what we want to see, and we don’t see what we don’t want to see.

This piece of truth and the knowledge of it works for both the world around you and the world within you. Because of their experiences, some people see only evil in all Democrats, or all Republicans, in all Catholics or all not-Catholic. Still others see all men as evil, or all women. Or they see a group of people as inferior, or they see themselves as inferior. All of us, of course, have our prejudices and generalizations about groups of people.

Let me emphasize over and over – truly what that person sees is what they see. It is not merely a habit, but a principle of life, and an unacknowledged part of the soul. You cannot convince them otherwise.

A person in total darkness can see only what some light might illumine – and so many of us are, in so many ways, in the dark.

A poet once said that our heart lets in the light only through its cracks! The point is that we change – often – because of some failure, frustration, hurt, shortcoming – a broken-heartedness that lets in the light of humility, understanding, and compassion.

When some effort, passion, test, friend, or even expectation fails us, we may awaken to the deeper parts of ourselves and discover where our treasure is – within. Sometimes a light goes on, as we say, and we discover what is truly important.

And other times it just takes patience to teach ourselves, prayer to discover ourselves and deliberate thoughtfulness to change habitual behavior. What is of greatest, prime value, this passage assumes, is to grow in love with one another – and discover the great rewards of taking that direction, discovering that treasure