Hang on? Or let go? Hard question!

One bitterly cold day Saint Martin of Tours came across a half-naked beggar shivering in the cold.  Many people had passed this man, and seen him shivering, but no one had stopped to help him.  Moved with compassion, Martin used his sword to cut his cloak in two and gave one half to the beggar to keep him warm.  Martin was not owned by his possessions; he was able to leave them behind in order to help a stranger.  And from this he came to know Christ more deeply – that very night he had a dream in which he saw Christ wearing the half of the cloak he gave to the man.

As I compare that to my own experiences, I realize that I fall way short of what is expected of me.  I have given money to people on the street, bought meals for the hungry, and even gave a sweatshirt of mine to a homeless man who told me he was cold.  But I didn’t EMPTY my pockets (after all, I may need something myself later on), I stopped at feeding just one hungry man that day (although I was asked twice), and the sweatshirt was an extra one (in fact, it was an identical sweatshirt to another I had in my car!).  

The book of Wisdom says, “All men were by nature foolish who were in ignorance of God” (Wisdom 13: 1-9).  To have true wisdom, then, you must know God.  But do we really know God?  Or do we let ‘things’ get in the way? 

Wisdom continues, saying, “though they seek God and wish to find Him…[and] they search busily among His works, they are distracted by what they see, because the things seen are fair”.  Do we get distracted by the things of this earth: our belongings, our attitudes, and/or our wealth?  It’s easy to get distracted by the things of this earth, but we are called to be more like St. Martin of Tours.  We need to be willing to leave things behind that may distract us from gaining a life with God - whether it be our material goods, or our ideas and prejudices.  Leaving things behind is hard.  It is difficult to think about parting with the comforts of this life.  But these distractions prevent us from knowing Christ deeply. 

This all reminds me of a saying that, while profound, is particularly amusing to me, given my career; “You never see a U-Haul behind a hearse”!  In other words, you can’t take your ‘stuff’ with you after you die, so why treat these material goods like they’re incredibly important?  [For the record, the reason I find the old saying amusing is that I have seen a U-Haul behind a hearse.  Because I worked for U-Haul for 25 years before retiring last year, and I may have seen just about everything!  In this case, the hearse’s owner had just bought the car and was taking it to another city.  The trailer was for his few pieces of luggage that wouldn’t fit in the hearse.]

Today we are called to question, what in this life is distracting us from knowing God?  How might giving up these belongings help us strengthen our relationship with Christ?  And how can I incorporate the actions of St. Martin of Tours and many other saints into my own life?

Sometimes it seems that living a life of sin is a lot easier than living a Christ-like one.  But what would happen if the Lord came down from heaven right now and passed judgment on us all?  A pastor once asked his congregation: “Do you want to go to heaven?”   Of course all responded with a resounding “Yes!”  He went on, “Good. Who wants to go to heaven now?”  And there was silence.  As we are told in the Gospel, our Lord's last coming will be something sudden and unexpected; it will catch many people unprepared (Luke 17:26-37).  God isn’t going to warn us.  He’s not going to say, “Hey everyone! I’m coming next week so you should probably all go to confession and stop sinning”.  And since we don’t know when our last day on this earth is, and we don’t know when the Lord will come, shouldn’t we live everyday like it was our last?  Shouldn’t we walk away from our sinful lives?

  The Gospel’s teaching has an urgency about it; Jesus is telling us that we need to examine our actions now so that the Lord can call on us when we least expect it.  The people during Noah’s time were going about their sinful lives until the floods came and they died without repentance.  The same can be said for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God loves us so much that He doesn’t want that to happen to us!  He wants us to change our ways so that when judgment does come, we don’t have to suffer like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The Gospel is calling us to reexamine our lives and our actions. It is calling us to stop leading a sinful life.  And it is calling us to instead be an example of Christ’s steadfast love and kindness.