Set For Life
I’m one of the over 100,000,000 Americans who enter the annual HGTV Dream Home Sweepstakes. It ought to be called the Pipe Dream Sweepstakes. The odds of my winning are infinitesimally small. But I still enter, hoping to win the big prize.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with hoping to win. There can however be something wrong with why I hope to win. For instance, if I hope to win because Kathy and I will feel “set for life,” then I have several problems. For instance, nothing in this life is “set.” And, once we feel set for life, we’re no longer “set” for the next life. In fact, we’ve left ourselves open to greed.
I became aware of this set-for-life temptation while reading one of Jesus’ parables alongside Iain McGilchrist’s recent book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. McGilchrist uses the word matter in two ways. Most of us are deluded about the essence (matter) of things. And because we’re deluded, we’re blind to what’s wrong (what’s the matter?) with how we view things.
This has everything to do with most of us. It is estimated 95 percent of the Western world’s population biases the left hemisphere of the brain. The left imagines the essence of things as commodities to be frozen in time, or “set.” But McGilchrist notes that no things in this life are “set.” So 95 percent of the population is deluded about things, or stuff.
The right brain recognizes that nothing in this life is set. But that’s only five percent of our Western world population. The few who bias the right brain “imagine things as more akin to a process,” McGilchrist writes. Things cannot be fixed in time for everything is “flow.”
Now I admit this idea of “flow” was unfamiliar to me at first. McGilchrist cites the human body as one example. Some of your body is replaced every day while most of it is replaced every seven years. Our bodies are mostly “flow.”
So is creation. The series Life After People depicts what happens if humans suddenly disappeared from the planet. All things, from the Washington Monument to the Rocky Mountains, “flow” back into the earth over the span of many millennia. No thing is “set.”
Time-lapse photography captures “flow” that occurs over a long period time. It shows how a plant grows, or a glacier moves. In fact, if we could capture many millennia, we’d see everything flows back to original creation. Yes, flow is a biblical notion.
God is an eternal flow of self-emptying love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. He created the heavens and the earth to widen His flow of self-emptying love, to extend His eternal flow of love to His creatures. That’s why Meister Eckhart saw creation not as something that has happened, but what is happening, at each moment. Every created thing is flow. But recognizing this requires entering God’s flow of self-emptying love.
Which brings us to Jesus’ parable of the rich fool. He stuffed his barns with stuff so that he could kick back and enjoy a leisurely life. The rich man viewed things as commodities that can be set in place, frozen in time. But the very act of having things set for life left this man unprotected from the capital sin of greed.
Look at the setup. Someone asks Jesus to arbitrate a dispute over an inheritance. Jesus declines. God knows every secret of the heart, so Jesus knows this person is secretly greedy. He issues a stern warning to the crowd: “Look out! Protect yourself against the least bit of greed. Life is not defined by what you have, even when you have a lot.”
Greed is defining life as having an abundance of possessions. Like the rich man in Jesus’ parable. He did very well financially, stuffing his barns, then saying to himself, “Now you have an abundance of good stored up for many years to come. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” Goodbye work, hello life of leisure. This rich man felt set for life.
He wasn’t. He left himself unprotected from greed. Greed (or avarice) is the disordered love of riches. It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins, a “capital” sin because it gives rise to other sins. One of those sins is how riches can cause us to deny the God of self-emptying love, breaking the Foremost Commandment of having no other gods before the One True God.
When we break the first commandment, we forget how this life is supposed to be about self-emptying rather than filling our lives with stuff to feel all set. This feeling renders us no longer “all set” for the next life, for heaven. We see this in how Jesus closes his parable. The rich man’s sipping his mint julep on the veranda (I’m making this part up) when God suddenly shows up, calling the man a fool! “Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods—who gets it? This is what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”
Jesus’ parable about the rich man hits home. I’m a Baby Boomer. In a few months I collect my first Social Security check. It’s easy to imagine this money, along with our retirement savings, makes Kathy and me set for life.
I could not be more wrong.
I’ll tell you why tomorrow. Yep, a bonus post for all subscribers. Stay tuned.