Matthew 13:44 - 52
When I was four years old I did not want to be a fireman; I wanted to be a cowboy. My parents supported my decision and bought me a little hat, a toy pistol and a bandanna, and I would ride my trusty tricycle and shoot at neighborhood dogs. But as time went on, I left this dream behind. I had many other vocational goals; there was a time when I thought it would be neat to be a priest -- I was about seven. I flirted with being an auto mechanic, an air force officer, a policeman, even a farmer, since the uncle that I looked up to the most was a farmer and seemed to enjoy it. But as I reached the age where I had to get serious about my future, my reasoning evolved more to deciding what I didn’t want. In high school I didn’t want anything to do with professional sports, engineering, being a salesman -- and in college I gravitated away from a profession involving precision, like chemistry. But I still had too many choices, too many interests. I liked English literature; I enjoyed my theology and philosophy courses; I really liked advanced math and physics. And I envisioned myself being a college professor, with a corduroy coat with elbow patches and a pipe. By the time I had to decide what to do when I graduated, I had firmly decided on becoming a psychiatrist, because that seemed to be a profession that combined everything in which I was interested. Until I actually took a psychiatry rotation in my training. I could go on but I won’t. The point is, everyone begins with a countless number of choices ,and somewhere along the line you have to give up everything if you want the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field.
Every choice we make is also a renunciation. We all want the right things, but we want other things as well. If I marry one person, I give up being married to others. If I live in one part of the country I can’t live in others (unless I’m a snowbird, of course, but even then…). If I choose one career, I have to turn my back on other ways to make a living, to live my life. And if you examine yourself when you have made a choice, but also a renunciation, you find that there is pain over the loss of what you might have chosen. It may be a very small twinge, but it might be something more difficult. When I got married I discovered that putting my wife first meant putting my birth family second. When we chose to spend our money on educating our children in catholic institutions rather than enjoying the good things our income could have gotten us, there was a little pain mixed in to the choice we thought was right. When I had to choose my specialty in medicine, I had to turn away from many specialties which I found very interesting. Pain always accompanies our choices.
The point is that we are infinite beings in a finite world, in finite bodies. We want everything but have to settle for some things. We have a finite life span and we make bucket lists sometimes or we just drift other times until we find that we’ve run out of time and we come up against the fact that we now are seeing our possibilities become fewer and fewer. A friend of mine counts it as a good day when he can go out in his yard and water the plants.
Jesus gives us these two parables and challenges us: What is your pearl of great price!? What are you willing to give up to gain it? Because it’s not until you’ve made that decision that you can begin to grow.
A person who finally commits to loving one person above all others is someone who can begin to truly embrace the fruits of matrimony. A person who has a call to the religious life or the priesthood can begin to reap the joy in these vocations when he or she gives up everything else. A person who is called to single life, and there are many, can begin to grow in a special way when he or she accepts that other states in life are not for him or her.
The same can be said of all our choices. When you hold back, when you refuse to commit, you can’t move forward. I had a friend who was torn between medicine and music, and tried to avoid having to choose. Although she was extremely talented in both areas, she never realized her potential in either.
One of the messages of Christianity is that this life is a trial run. We don’t understand how it works, we don’t really know what we are talking about when we talk about the life after death; but we are assured by Jesus Christ himself that there is a state of existence when every tear will be wiped away, when there is no more pain of renunciation with our choices, when we are finally infinite beings in infinity. So today let us embrace our choices, never looking back, knowing that in the long run the pain of being human will be taken up into the resurrection of Jesus.
