Grace Notes: Letting Go

By SISTER ANNE MARIE WALSH, SOLT
Lumen Media columnist

People are anxious about many things these days. When a person does not stay in a primary dependence upon God, it becomes clear quickly that any other dependency outside of God will lead to insecurity and an apprehensiveness that can take on a life of its own. Perhaps the most common dependency that people use to replace their dependence upon God is found in materialism.

There is a reflection of this in the fall in the garden. Up until the time of the fall, Adam and Eve were happily and unselfconsciously dependent upon God. With the decision to eat the forbidden fruit, they essentially detached themselves from God and attached themselves to the created world, drawn in by its beauty and seductive promises.

That is the nature of materialism. We pursue possessions because we see the good in them, but at the same time, we over-value them in relation to God to the point where they usurp his place in our lives. 

They become for us little gods or idols that are incompatible with trust in God. It is not possible to depend on or serve something outside of God while depending on him at the same time, primarily because the goals of materialism fall so far short of the goals God has set for us. 
 
Ideally, we should spend our time here on earth longing for and preparing for eternity, enchanted by the idea of it. But we know most of us don’t live our lives that way. We conflate material prosperity with blessings and success. Yet, there’s no place in the life of Jesus where you see this as a reality. 

In fact, Jesus purposely chose poverty to illustrate the opposite, that real riches are not to be found in the things of the Earth, the things that are passing away, but in heaven, where neither moth nor rust can destroy the true treasures that await us.
 
Jesus understood our tendency to try to serve both God and mammon. He clearly told us that it’s impossible to serve both; we will have one or the other as our master. In one, we find transcendence, transformation and true worth. In the other, we encounter degradation and a state far below our dignity. Scott Hahn puts it succinctly in his book Reasons to Believe:  "To pretend to serve God and the world is the same as to imagine that we can be both proud and humble at the same time. A vain dream!"

 A striking and representative example of this struggle is found in the history of the conquistadores, who came to the New World seeking gold, glory and in the case of the Spanish missionaries, to spread the word of God. 

The greed for gold often nullified the nobler witnesses that were present. It certainly had a negative impact upon evangelization. Only Our Lady was able to salvage the work of the early missionaries through her appearances as Our Lady of Guadalupe. But this is nearly a universal struggle. It has marked the history of mankind from the beginning. 

When the relations between the Aztecs and the Spaniards had come to a head and the Spaniards were being driven from the city (Tenochtitlan), the soldiers tried to escape under the cover of night in the middle of a rainstorm. The elite troops of the Aztecs discovered the attempted escape and engaged in battle with them.

That night (June 30, 1520) became known as the “Night of Tears” because the Spanish soldiers were told by their leader (Cortés) that they could take as much gold as they could carry. And in their greed, they were so loaded down that many of them fell into the water from the causeways leading into the city and drowned. The obvious point here is that not only did their gold not save them, but it actually became the cause of their demise.
 
A more contemporary example of the problem with attachment and even of lust for material things is found in the phenomenon of hoarding, which appears to be more prevalent than ever today. This is a complex disorder, but again, it functions from the distortion of dependence on material reality for our well-being. 

Recently, the remains of a 73-year-old woman who had been missing for some time were found buried underneath piles of trash in her house. She had suffered from this problem with hoarding, and it ended up taking her to a tragic end.
 
It is easy to dismiss these examples as extreme. But we all struggle to some degree with this. More so in a culture that is as affluent as ours, though even the poor can be consumed by the desire for things they don’t have but would embrace if they were able. (I am referring to things beyond necessity.) The danger of material well-being is always the delusion that we no longer need God. It’s almost predictable that the more well-off we are, the more distant we become from God.
 
 As we move more toward the end of our lives, there is often a movement of simplification that takes over, as if in our spirit we finally understand Job’s observation: “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return again. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

True well-being is oriented toward eternity and the real treasure that awaits us. Everything else becomes an exercise in letting go!