I consider attachment from the perspective – not of this world and its hundreds of millions of years – but from the perspective of the next one and ETERNITY.
Saint Francis de Salles preached often about detachment from material things.
In one sermon he gave an example of a pharmacist – or an apothecary as they were called in those days – when explaining the importance of detachment from material things.
In the sermon Saint Francis explained… A pharmacist has a shop-full of poisons. In fact, all of their medicines could be capable of poisoning someone. But, the pharmacist does not become poisoned because they do not put the poisons inside their own bodies. And Saint Francis explained that is the whole point of detachment from material things.
Clearly, we must remain in the world if we are not living in a cloistered community. And living in the world means that we must work to earn a living, use our money to buy ourselves necessities and luxuries. We must speak to others and interact with them socially. We must basically live in the world. And yet – most importantly – we are not OF the world. And this means that while we must live in it, it should not be the thing that we are attached to.
In other words, we should be like the pharmacist in Saint Francis de Salles’ example, and we should be able to stand inside the shop without letting the shop stand inside our bodies. And this is how I should be treating the world. It should be around my soul by not within my soul. For the world is such a fleeting thing.
Think only of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs wandered the earth over a period of one hundred and sixty five million years. Then – sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs became extinct – through no fault of their own. Now, to put this into perspective, Adam and Eve – the first human beings – were on the earth between six and two million years ago. In other words, literally hundreds of millions of years AFTER the dinosaurs first walked the earth, the first human came along. And we have had such a fleeting existence on this planet. If we were to attach to the things of this world we would get – at a best case – one hundred years. And of those one-hundred years, the first and last ten years would be mostly beyond our memory and cognition. And that means in a best-case scenario, we get to experience our intellect and capacity on this planet for about eighty years.
And what does that mean? Well, it means that in the perspective of hundreds of millions of years, eighty years is so tiny it almost does not exist. And it means that if we are attaching even to a small part of this world, we are attaching for an instant.
And when I think about that today, I consider attachment from the perspective – not of this world and its hundreds of millions of years – but from the perspective of the next one and ETERNITY.
And that seems to me to be a pretty strong reason to be detached from this world… A pretty strong reason…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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