No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Lk 16:13)
…echoes from last Sunday’s Gospel. What a beautiful selection of readings we had this past Sunday. The message of the Prophet Amos is hardly anachronistic: “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land!” (Am 8:4) How many different interpretations have we heard of the same passage “[y]ou cannot serve God and mammon”? We change it around as we like so it can fit our lifestyles and our comfort. We constantly make excuses for our irresponsible spending and our selfish consumerism: “No, I’m not materialistic, I really need this… you don’t understand.” At least, that used to be my line when I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars in clothes every month, because I felt that I needed them.
When I think of wealth and excesses, I think of a heavy fur coat. Let me explain. I am not going to sugar-coat it, because I myself know very well how wealth can damage the soul and make difficult our path to the divine union, so I am going to start by putting myself out there and say that I think wealth is opposed (if not diametrically) to the Gospel. 
I am not a literalist or an extremist. I just lived and breathed wealth, comfort and excesses and realized how “things” turned into an extension of my being. I had become self-contained and when there is self-containment there cannot be self-emptying.
Let me go back to my analogy. I had said previously that wealth is like a heavy fur coat, but perhaps an example can convey my idea a bit better. Think of expensive cars, for instance. I had one. I could have bought a car that was $10K less, because it served the same purpose: to transport myself from A to B, but no, I wanted the European luxury car and so I got it. Why did I buy it? Because it was nice and if people saw me in a nice car, they would know that I was a nice person with enough money to buy a nice car. That’s the key. It was nice. Therefore, I treated the car as an extension of my being, because I wanted to reflect “niceness” through a car. Forget for a second that if I really wanted to be nice and show it accordingly to other people, I could have probably volunteered to help someone out or have been polite to someone at work. No. The car was going to do this for me. Obviously, I did not want to just be “nice,” but I wanted attention and needed to be admired because of my acquisition power. I wanted to make a statement–to show off my paycheck through my car. If you’re following my logic up until this point: my salary (money) had become an extension of my being! To say anything less would be a ridiculous and naive lie.
What does the heavy coat have to do with wealth? Well, let me explain with my “glorious” life example again. After my “second” conversion, I realized how empty I was. I despised my car. I wanted it as far away from me as possible. It was a reminder of my emptiness and self-gratification. I passed by homeless people asking for money in intersections and there I was in my comfortable air-conditioned $30K imported car either giving them nothing or just a couple of bucks. Then I asked Michael: “Why are there homeless people in America if the unemployment in this country is so low?” I was blind… so blind… because it was just me and my European car. It was not only the car. It was the clothes, the shoes, the countless purses, the expensive dinners…
I was wearing the heavy coat. Every time I made another “thing” an extension of my being and an indispensable part of my existence I was making that coat even heavier and more insulating. My skin was no longer in direct contact with the world: I could not feel the cold that the homeless felt during the cold winter nights, I could not feel how the summer heat burned the skin of those who labor during the day, I could not feel the gentle spring breeze and its wonderful smells… I was insulated. The layers that provided such insulation were mere “things.” And so we become insulated when we put “things” first, and the coat gets as many layers as we allow it to. That is why the kingdom of God is for the simple, the poor in spirit, the children… because they are not insulated… they are open and ready to receive the Word of God.
Therefore, we do not seek poverty as an end in itself. That is not how the saints understood Gospel poverty. Rather, as Christians we seek to be as close to God, our loved one, as possible. And so we joyfully embrace poverty, because of the freedom it gives us to see our beloved in the sacrament and everyone we meet.
A soul makes room for God by wiping away all the smudges and smears of creatures, by uniting its will perfectly to God’s; for to love is to labor to divest and deprive oneself for God of all that is not God. When this is done the soul will be illumined by and transformed in God. And God will so communicate His supernatural being to it that it will appear to be God Himself and will possess what God himself posseses.”
– St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In