Your Catholic Faith is your pearl of great price.

Wednesday, 8/1/12

Jesus tells us to sell all we own so we may come into possession of heaven. In looking around we see many people who are not true to Our Lord’s words.

The Persian poet Omar Khayyam put the opposite view into verse. He wrote:

            Some for the glories of this world,

and some sigh for the prophet’s paradise to come.

Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.

The distant drum can take many forms. It can be the aging golfer’s soaring handicap warning him of worse to come. The sound of that drum could be the flabby arms of a former beauty, or it could be the I.R.S. man coming with terrible questions.

As a young man the novitiate I was about to enter was a thing of devastating bleakness. I used to tell myself, “If you only had two lives one of them would be wild.”

In saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a buried treasure or like a pearl of great price Jesus was making almost the same point with both images, but there is a small difference. You might cash in the treasure, then go off on a spending spree; but you wouldn’t give up the pearl for love or money. Your Catholic Faith is your pearl of great price.