Give It Away Now
My very first summer assignment as a seminarian for the diocese of Wilmington involved driving a 16-passenger van to nowhere Ohio on a youth trip to a “Jesus-Jamboree,” as the teens jokingly called it. They were mostly sophomores and juniors from St. Mark’s High, Padua and Sallies, and were approaching said trip with a mixture of apathy, anxiety and a little joy.
By the time we reached the Alleghany Mountains of western Pennsylvania that Sunday afternoon in late June, even the most bored teens among the group expressed their admiration for the beauty of the river valley through which we were passing. Coming from very flat Delaware, the Alleghenies were quite something to experience for the first time.
Passing through one of the highest vistas northwest of Altoona, a male voice from the rear of the van shouts: “The view would be awesome if this stupid barn wasn’t in the way!”
He wasn’t wrong. Now admittedly, the barn itself was fine – it was doing its job: storing grain, housing animals, and sheltering farm equipment. It actually was a barn the Amish could be proud of. Unfortunately for us road-weary travelers, however, it blocked out everything we longed to see from the crest of Route 322.
Perhaps this is the point Jesus is trying to make in today’s Gospel parable: don’t allow your barns to block your view.
We spend our lives building barns, oftentimes in ways we don’t mean to. And although it would be easy to hear Jesus’ advice and pass it off as only for those who spend their lives chasing money and excessive material comforts, I think doing so may miss the point entirely.
Yes, the Lord is clear: don’t let consumerism and comfort-at-any-cost redirect your mind or distract your heart from the things that really matter: loving authentically; living without sin; offering mercy; and getting to heaven. They are, when all is said and done, what really matter, and too often, the shiny things of the world become the very things in which we place our trust. We must guard against such false harvests.
But there are other barns we erect that often block the view for which we’re made: barns of jealousy and barns of judgment; barns of anger and pride; barns that scream: “Life is all about me, me, me.”
One Scripture scholar commented on the fact that nowhere else in the Gospels does a character use as many first-person self-centered pronouns as does this barn builder: “What shall I do? “I do not have space.” “I shall build larger ones.” I, I, I.
That’s not the way of Christ, the “I AM” who reminds us: I am the Good Shepherd; I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; I am the Light of the World; I am the Bread of Life.”
The I AM of Christ is not one who stores-up a selfish harvest, but instead is one who pours that harvest out for others. The I AM of Christ is one who tears down barns and silos that insulate and ignore, protect and avoid.
These are not the barns Christ wants us to spend our lives building. And yet, we often do, don’t we? Life is hard and people often let us down. We’ve been hurt in a variety of ways and sinful behaviors often cloud our vision. All of these factors contribute to our barn-raising behaviors, but such are not the lasting ways of Christ or His disciples.
Paul makes it clear to the Colossians (second reading) and to us: Begin tearing down the barns that keep us self-centered and drowning in sin. Tear down the barns that block our view of eternity: immorality, impurity, and greed that becomes idolatrous.
What’s blocking your view these days? Spend some time praying with that question this week.
Then having done so, especially if it’s been a while, return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Doing so will strip us of our old ways and allow our hearts and lives to be transformed by the I AM who feeds us as He leads us. When we allow the Bread of Life to transform us, we have the God-given courage to tear-down barns and begin to gather treasure that really matters: love, joy, peace, mercy, compassion …
And the interesting thing about those gifts? They aren’t meant to be stored. Their meant to be shared and given away.
There, too, is the other connection to this parable: the selfish barn-builder gathered grains for himself only. Jesus, the Bread of Life, becomes the very grain that is used to feed the world. Thus, Jesus’ very life points to the fact that we only truly begin to live when we spend our lives being poured out for others.
Everything about God is connected to the understanding that true love transforms in order to feed those around us. That’s why the significance of bringing up the gifts at every Mass is such a symbolically sacred act: your life and mine – everyone and everything we hold dear and worry about – is placed within the same ciborium as the bread and wine which are transformed into the Body and Blood of Love Incarnate. As they are transformed on the altar of sacrificial love to become Christ for us, so too are we for others.
And when that happens, our barns of selfishness and fear no longer block our view.
Just last week, I stumbled across a story from a writer in Mobile, Alabama, who happened to take a walk through his local city park on his way back from a short lunch break. By his own account, he was self-absorbed in his phone, in his job, and in his selfish plans to ‘drink and hopefully get lucky’ later that night.
Out of the corner of his eye, however, as he hustled past the large plastic playground equipment that had seen better days, he watched as an older woman dressed in the bland navy-blue uniform of a big-box store out in the suburbs lifted a child from his wheelchair and carried him over to the slide. The entire time she did so, he could hear the little boy calling his Mom the name of some action-movie enemy who was intent on trying to destroy him. Mom, of course, played along, making all the noises one makes when airplanes swoop-in to attack and laser beam guns shoot powerful death rays. “She was good, too,” said the writer, and her son was clearly loving being the good guy.
At that moment, the boy-hero says to ‘enemy’ Mom: “I will defeat you on the Death-Star Slide,” to which she yells in a villainous tone: “Try to stop me.” Without missing a beat, she then lifts his broken body up the ladder and follows him closely with a supportive arm as the “battle” rages on down the curved plastic slide. She must have done this at least 5 times, and the writer -- now actually stopping to watch the play-drama unfold -- could see that Mom was clearly exhausted. Her son was heavy, and the ladder steep. But she kept going, because she knew: on the slide, her boy felt free.
As she picked the hero up at the bottom of the slide to begin a sixth round of battle, he stops mid-explosion – noticing the sweat and strain that now shrouds the face of his ‘enemy’ – and says: “I love you, Mommy.”
“I know, sweetie,” she says … and then carries him off to Round Six of the Death-Star Epic Battle.
And in that moment, said the too-busy writer from Mobile, “I realized I was spending my life chasing the wrong things, and living only for myself. It took the exhausted love of a mother and her son to show me what life should be about, and I determined to make a lasting change of mind and heart.”
Or as Jesus would say: To begin tearing down the barns that block the view of eternal Love.