18th Sunday of Year C - The Oblates' Weekend

St. Benedict believed that humility is the door to a full and happy life. So what
is humility? Something to do with truth, with being in reality. And perhaps, with
today’s readings - “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” - perhaps one could risk this:
humility is accepting I’m going to die. And then we can live.
“You turn men back into dust and say, ‘Go back, sons of men’”, says the
Responsorial Psalm. The word ‘humility’ comes from the Latin humus, meaning
ground, soil, earth - the very thing we’re going to be turned back into. “Remember,
man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return” - the great refrain of Ash
Wednesday. Humility has something to do with reality. Well, there’s reality. I’m going
to die. “Fool, says God in the Gospel, this very night the demand will be made for
your soul!”
I don’t think the rich fool wasn’t aware of death. In his way he was. His mistake
was what he did about it. He was right to fight it, but his strategy was amiss. He
wanted to buy death off, as it were, to secure himself against it by things, by more
and more things. His problem, in Greek, was pleonexia: greed, avarice. The word
means literally having more, more than we need, more than we’ve got already, more
than the people next door. It’s the compulsion to get, to have. St. Basil, who preached
a memorable homily on this Gospel, feels awfully sorry for this man. What a
wretched inner life he had! “Laborious days...restless nights...bigger barns”... more
and more, just to make sure. Yes, he knew, at one level, he was going to die. But he
wouldn’t look the fact in the face. He wouldn’t accept it. He didn’t train for death, as
the ancient sages put it. Every failure is a failure in humility. There it was. And if he
had accepted it, he wouldn’t be remembered as a fool. He would have found the door
to a full and happy life. “Make us know the shortness of our life,” says the Psalm
instead, “that we may gain wisdom of heart.” And wisdom, says St Thomas, is the
capacity to order things rightly, not least money, things, possessions.
Humility is accepting I’m going to die, and humility makes us live. If you ask
people who have had narrow escapes from death, or have recovered unexpectedly
from life-threatening illnesses, or have had near-death experiences, I’m sure they
would say their life has been enhanced by these things. Prayer can do it too. There
was once a woman, a woman of prayer (very much), a nun of the Orthodox Church.
She was sitting by the tomb of a martyr in a cathedral. And suddenly, she says, “it
was as if my life on earth were finished and lay far behind me and the new life had
not yet begun; it was a pause of infinite peace where, for one moment, I could rest... I
called it the ‘peace of the End’.” She had, we could say, accepted death and, in that
way, overcome it. And the result was a surge of vitality, a resurrection. She called it
the overcoming of all passivity: re-action, re-sentment, re-venge. She was free. I
think of Dom André Louf, a French monk who died recently. As he grew older he
found himself more and more aware, more and more full of joy at the little signs of
God’s beauty all around him in ordinary life. That was the fruit of a long life living
that saying of the Rule: keep death daily before your eyes. I think too of the story I
heard from a couple in Northern Ireland. Their 18 year old son, their only child, was
killed in a senseless sectarian killing. The couple were devastated. They resolved to
take their own lives. They put the pills on the table, and prepared to go ahead.
Suddenly they thought, Perhaps there’s another way. Then they heard of the plight of
orphans in Moldova. And they thought, We at least had a child. Here are children who
have never had a parent. Let’s help them. Now, said the father, we have 300 children.
The poor rich fool! God, says St Basil, was so good to him. His harvests, his
wealth - it was all a gift of God. He didn’t see that. If only, instead of hugging it all to
himself, he had passed the gift on. God was loving him so that he would love others.
“Are you short of barns?” asks St. Basil. “You will find them in the empty stomachs
of the poor.” Every gift we have, material or otherwise, every gift is for giving on.
And then it won’t be “vanity of vanities.” And the breath of eternal life will be in us.
“You have died, says St Paul, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in
God.” Yes, Christ has died, and Christ is risen. And by baptism what’s his is ours. So
we have accepted death, and overcome it. We’re already judged and justified. And so
we can live: by faith, hope and love, and in the fullness of time all together in the
house and vision of the living God.
Fr. Hugh, O. S. B.