Back in the last century when I was a child it would be about this time of year that something would arrive in our mail delivered to us by an exhausted letter carrier. It was a catalog, actual several of them, just in time for Christmas.
Now to you who are not from that century a catalog is really just a thing made out of paper, a book if you will, where, instead of scrolling, you turned the pages and there were pictures and prices of things you could buy. If you wanted something you’d send a check to an address after filling out a form or, perhaps, you’d travel downtown to the actual store and pick it up for yourself. It was a very analog and organic approach to sales and way ahead of its time because it could also be recycled. How cool was that!
And the Christmas catalogs back then were skillfully created to ensure that children would nag their parents day and night for whatever caught their eye in anticipation of the big day. You see the boring stuff like draperies and shoes and housewares were printed in a kind of monotone, not unlike early Windows operating systems, but the potential Christmas presents were printed, at least in my era of the last century, in bright, glossy color that jumped out at our eager little eyes.
Even back then, in the days of only three TV networks, we were already being educated in how to be good members of the consumer society, acquirers of stuff, desirous of whatever was next. And people my age are the ones who raised most of you listening to me right now with what we’d been groomed with ourselves. In our defense we, too, were children of our time and mostly unconscious of the cultural waters in which we swam.
That being said, the catalog people didn’t, however, tell us about the very large downside, the reality that our treasures would break or soon lose our interest or that there would be a later version of our gifts to deliberately render our current ones obsolete. As we grew older they also didn’t tell us that the stuff we thought we wanted to own would start to own us, that bigger, better, faster, and more would require maintenance, upkeep, and a constant chase to stay ahead in the game. They left us blissfully unaware that more stuff means more work and we were definitely never told that everything we thought was ours would one day be someone else’s via the thrift store or eternally slip from our grasp when, one day, our kids would throw it away after our funeral.
They also didn’t tell us that to keep, acquire, and maintain we’d find ourselves making personal compromises. At first they’d be little things but as time wore on the quest for more and the maintenance that would follow would strongly tempt us to cut corners with our family, our politics, our lives, our morals, our faith, and, indeed, our souls.
Threatened with the loss of the things of this world, the pressure to sacrifice our moral core values and the things of eternity can grow, like the rich man in our Gospel, in its allure and what were, at first, little nips around the edges over time can easily turn into large gashes across our souls. Like fish caught up in the moment our vision can easily be blinded to the hook within the easy meal. The fear of losing what we spent so much time and effort to gain and the compromises we found ourselves making to allay that fear are why the Scripture warns us that the love of money is the root of evil but the more we acquire the greater the temptation to ignore the alarm.
Still, there is no evil, per se, in having things. There is, however, great evil afoot if we find ourselves paying for them with our souls. Our Lord knows we have physical and practical needs but if getting them causes us to fall away from being rich in the things of God then we need to ask some hard questions of ourselves. If the compromises we make to keep the temporal start robbing us of the eternal then perhaps this time of fasting is also our wake up call.
Our Orthodox history is full of people who gladly exchanged the whole world, all the things they’d acquired so they could keep their soul. Out stories don’t necessarily have to be exactly like theirs, although they might, but surely the watchfulness they had, the larger vision, the eternal perspective should be ours as well.
On His arrival among us our Lord changed everything and those who accept His story as theirs will see the whole world in a different way. To the faithful Christian what matters no longer comes through catalogs and marketing and the wisdom of this world but rather of that which is, while already present among us, also to come. The eyes that see eternity also see the present in a different way and filter even the good things of this world through God’s lens. And those who choose to keep their soul, especially in a world where the temptation to sell it cheap is pervasive, will find the riches of heaven, the life to come even in the present and become children not just of the times but eternity.
Whatever else happens in this world, my dear Orthodox friends, never sell your soul cheap. Never, ever, ever.
The Beautiful Path 