Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
July 31, 2016 11:00 am · Father Dan Vanyo
Greed, hoarding, materialism. Take your pick, take which ever one that connects with you the most. I recently entered a home where there was a case of extreme hoarding. I can think of two other examples that I have seen that were about the same level. Boxes stacked everywhere in all rooms, all living spaces. You are barely able to get through from one room to the other, real thin little areas to walk through all the stuff. Spiders crawling in all the ceiling corners and crawling around on all the boxes. Unlivable at least for other people. Because the person doesn't see anything wrong with it. The rest of their family sees everything wrong with it. But they're unable to change. So there's a real mental and/or spiritual illness going on. It's a real sickness. It's a sick situation.
In this house there also was a friend who was an enabler, if you can believe this. After talking for a few minutes with the person, you don't know who this is, I brought up St. Vincent de Paul could come by if you every want to get rid of some stuff. The friend responds like this. "She's not ready to give up anything yet, these are her treasures." Unbelievable. You had to see it to believe it, and then hear the enabling. Are the spiders treasures too? Horrible. Now Jesus tells us in the Gospel, when your life is demanded of you, the things that you have prepared, and to whom will they belong? Fixing your inheritance for your children, setting up your will, retirement, I've talked about that. That's all normal stuff, we're not talking about that, that's all normal fiscal responsibility. And let's put aside the example of the extreme hoarder. Do the rest of us have any issues in hoarding at a smaller level or materialism? Do we have a garages full of junk?