Letting Loose

Friday of Week 18
Saints Sixtus II, Pope and his Companions, Martyrs

Listening to pray-as-you-go this morning I was challenged with the thought that a pure hear is a heart that is open to God, a heart that doesn't seek its own advantage.  That is a non-marketplace notion.

What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?

The Gospel reading from Matthew 16:24-28 uses a lot of language that is of the marketplace…gain, forfeit, exchange, repay.  Marketplace language, as helpful as it may be in discussing economics, falls short when brought to bear on the life of faith.  Maybe that's what the passage is out to stir in me.

I think that the homo-economicus cultural paradigm that is pretty powerfully at work in my world reads this passage and hears threat.  But, it must be a promise…right?  To lose my life is to allow it to be broken and shared.  To lose my life is the eucharistic pattern of the way of discipleship.  It doesn't grab, it lets loose.  And in that letting loose I am not privy to outcome.  May I take up my cross, and may I take up what I might be able to carry for another, on my way to that kingdom promise.

Simple…certainly not easy.
Saint Companions, Pray for me.