The Anchoress � Where your treasure is, so will be your heart

I'm off to see part II of "Pope John Paul II" on CBS. Allow me to leave you with pure inspiration from The Anchoress.

Here's a glimpse of her genius!

In both essays we see treasure being mis-identified. The great thing about having wealth is not that one is wealthy, but that one is in a position to do a great deal of good with one’s money - as Ebeneezer Scrooge learned in Dickens’ lovely Christmas Story. The great thing about sex is that when it is engaged in out of love - real, committed love - it is not only great-but-fast, it is holy-and-eternal. An orgasm lasts a little while - love lives on.

There is nothing wrong with being rich - the world needs it’s Joseph of Arimetheas, who can provide a clean crypt in a hurry and get access to the flunky in charge of releasing a body - just as much as it needs its Baptizing Johns.

There is no sin in being rich and powerful, or in being lively, rambunctious or extremist in one’s views. Joseph and John were all of those things. Sin comes not from being any of those things, except when - in being rich, or powerful, or rambunctious or extremist - one has embraced one’s self over another, which always results in a failure of love…and a failure of love is the very definition of sin.

How do we fail in love by embracing ourselves? “I’m aborting two of my triplets because if I don’t I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise,” is a big and kind of obvious failure of love. but there are other failures, smaller ones. We Catholics call them “sins of omission,” when you know you really should invite your lonely elderly neighbor in for a cup of tea but you don’t, because she bores you and you can’t bear an hour of boredom. A failure of love is not listening when a teenager is trying to tell you something, because the subject makes you uncomfortable. A failure of love is calling human beings with whom you may disagree by names like “Chimpy” and “Blow-job.” A failure of love is misspending billions of dollars on “education” and “anti-poverty” policies that - twenty years on - have seen illiteracy rise and poverty far from eradicated, and then blaming those failures on the tax-harrassed middle-class or on anyone but the policy-writers. A failure of love is looking at someone in the car next to you and deciding whether that person is a “good” sort of person because of what he is driving or how heavy she appears to be, or what bumpersticker he or she feels the need to sport.

We all fail at love, every day and (like the word or not) because we all fail at love, we all sin. But we need not fail in love on the big things, like these issues of money and sex. Where our treasures are, there will lie our hearts.

Go read the whole thing!