HOMILY FOR EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (C)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. I remember once as a little child, my parents bought me an ice-cream cone. It was a ‘99’ with coloured sprinkles on top. It was delightful to look at and delicious to eat. About two licks into it, I tilted the cone too much to one side and suddenly the whole mass of ice-cream fell to the ground. There were tears and despair. My parents laughed at how seriously I took this tragedy because in their wisdom, they knew that there is so much more to life than ice-cream. But I was struggling to see it at the time. It was my first but not last lesson about the importance of detachment from things and attachment to what lasts forever and the One for whom we are made.

All three scripture readings for this Sunday are about detachment from the things of this passing world. Detachment is a word we don't hear much anymore which is tragic because it's liberating and it's the key the light heartedness and joy. In the Gospel today, Jesus tells the parable of the man who was attached to having more than he needed. He was planning for a future of ease and comfort. And then he died suddenly and his own plans came to nothing. In the words of the Gospel: ‘His life was demanded of him’. But he wasn’t ready, leaving him look foolish.

Friends, the Gospel is a timely reminder to us of having a healthy detachment to all things we might lose and will lose. At the same time, it is also a call to have the right attachment to God and his kingdom that ought to occupy first place in our lives. It is about our lives being properly ordered. This is NOT a teaching to leaving everything and everyone else aside or to despise everything as bad. Rather it is a call to see all things for what they are and not to replace our infinite longing for God with things that are not God. It is a call not to confuse the Creator with creatures and things. For if we do, we will end up sad, disappointed and miserable with the same lack of perspective that I had on losing the ice-cream.

C.S. Lewis once said that “nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy’.

So let us not idolize anything or anyone. Worship God alone and enjoy everything else with a right sense of perspective, seeing things and people for what they are. For if we make gods out of possessions and other people, we end up clinging too tightly to them which will be all the more painful when, eventually, we will have to let them go.

And so, for example, if you love the Fleadh and the week of music ahead, then great. Enjoy it. But it is not an end in itself. It too will come and go. If you love sports, material things, events and pleasures that make us look forward, then great. Enjoy them but don’t idolize them. If you are madly in love with someone and they with you, great. But don’t confuse human love with divine love. Don’t put divine expectations on human shoulders.

Ultimately the Gospel is a call to freedom. And if honest introspection reveals to us that our hearts are divided and given to the things of this world more than God then we need to train our hearts to detach ourselves from what we cling to and attach themselves to the One for whom our hearts were made. Herein lies the key to happiness.

To conclude with the words of St Augustine: ‘You have made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in You!’