Objective Wealth

“Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”

Who would I be without the things I own?

Could I live without my books, my old teapot, my posters on the walls, my orange lamp and the plants on my desk?

Who would I be without these objects?

They make me feel safe, they make a foreign room feel like a piece of home.

So I identified with the wealthy man in this passage. I am not sure I could go and sell everything I own, and follow Jesus. What I own isn’t worth a lot of money and yet I feel wealthy because the things I own are part of my story, of where I come from.

My mum gave me the gift of a ring and said that it had belonged to the women in my family. Recently, I have been dreaming about these women; who were they, what did they think, what did they feel, whom did they love, would we have gotten along?

When our memory fails us, when we cannot recall stories about our loved ones, we can still touch objects. We can trust what we see and what we feel.

I think the fact that we can touch these objects is reassuring. Our senses remind us that the experience was real, providing some sort of proof that it did, indeed, happen.

I am also attached to the things I own because most are gifts, from my friends and family. They are tokens of love. That’s why they feel like treasures somehow. And so I started wondering:

Do we have to live in rooms with white walls and no art, no old teapot and no books?

Could I give up all these tokens of love? Could you? Do we have to give them all up to follow Jesus?

I was shown this poem by a friend recently and thought I would share:

Advent

by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Through the needle’s eye

the rich man came

squeezing through stars

of razor light

that pared his body down to thread.

Gravity crushed his heart’s chime

and his breath that breathed out worlds

now flattened as fire between walls.

The impossible slit stripped him,

admitting him

to stitch the human breach.

Maybe Jesus’ lesson is this: that no matter how attached we are to objects, to these tokens of love, they remain objects that can get lost, be broken or burned. And that this doesn’t matter in the end because they are merely reminders of what should always come first - the relationships they remind us of.

What I think Jesus is trying to say here is that our relationship to God cannot be held in anything material. In truth, no love can really be held in an object, not even a teapot, no matter how old and round it is. They can only be tokens of love.

I would like to believe that Jesus is encouraging us to live a simple life, where attachments to the objects we own don’t make us forget that our true wealth is found in each other’s love and in God’s.