Possessions: 11 October 2009

Have you ever wondered about dreams? Not those stop in the middle of the day to let your mind wander off daydreams or the hopes and dreams we have for our future, but the dreams we encounter during our night’s sleep. I don’t pretend to be at all skilled in dream analysis, nor do I take the time to sit down and try to figure out what a particular dream meant or what may have prompted the dream. Of late I’ve been conscious of dreaming nearly every night. Most of them have been rather disturbing and some were down right nightmares. As a child, as I suspect with many children, there were a lot of nightmares. Those scary dreams I have in the wee hours of the morning are easy to remember (for a while) and most often cause difficulty in returning to sleep. But more often than not once the alarm goes off in the morning I have trouble remembering most if not all of the dreams. What little I can remember, the main theme of many usually plays out to be someone trying to take something away from me – a valued possession, a person in my life, or even an unknown villain trying to threaten my life or that of someone I love.

In real, waking life it’s difficult to say the least to have something or someone loved and integral to our life taken away from us. But how very hard it is to willingly give up things we value and prize – things that may mean nothing to anyone except us, things that visibly show us and the world we are successful and well off, things that in reality can well be viewed by ones so immersed in poverty as wasteful excess. The story of the rich young man who approached Jesus and asked what he needed to do, besides already having kept all the commandments, to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-22) is a great lesson in what really matters in life: to treat others with respect, to place much value and importance on assisting the poor of our world to the best of our ability and in doing so honoring our Sacred Creator and living as the caring, compassionate and loving people we are intended to be. Unfortunately for the young man, he went away sad because he had many possessions – things that defined who he was, things he was not ready or willing to give up.

This story gives us cause to ponder: what excess are we living with; what are the things we really do not need that would be of benefit to someone else and help to ease their lack of basic necessities? It all boils down to how we define ourselves – by our possessions or as the Sacred’s beloved.

Peace on the Journey.