Today’s readings: 1 Kings 3,5.7-12; Romans 8,28-30; Matthew 13,44-46.
Listening and attending to our deepest desires is the key to spiritual growth. The spiritual life does not concern the life of the soul as separate and distinct from the body, but concerns life as a whole, including what we deeply desire and what price we are ready to pay to have an integral life.
This is the hidden treasure the Gospel speaks about. It is hidden because it is not about superficial desires that alienate us in life. It is a treasure because it is the utmost good we can aspire to achieve. It is easy to miss the point in living, to misplace our energies, and to be misled in the way we spend our time.
The Scriptures today provoke us to examine the way we live, not in the moral sense but existentially, from the perspective of finding meaning in all we do. The gospel speaks of someone who finds a hidden treasure and “hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field”. These words contain the intensity of a spiritual journey and the stages of growth in learning how to live a meaningful existence.
The first reading speaks about the management of life, referring to Solomon who, on becoming King, and faced with the choice what to ask for, asked for “a heart wise and shrewd”. The heart can harbour a myriad of desires, but in the discernment of our desires we need to be wise and shrewd. There are desires worth dedicating your life for, and others that are futile but which we mistakenly treasure.
In international bestseller The Alchemist, author Paulo Coelho narrates the story of a young Andalusian shepherd who had a recurring dream about a treasure near the pyramids of Egypt. After a turbulent journey he realised that the treasure he sought was, after all, in the ruined church where he originally had his dream. The journey to find the treasure was meant to be an interior journey of self-discovery.
For many, an interior journey is simply something spiritual, perhaps easier to engage in, or which can be postponed to retirement age when we are less busy. This is very untrue, because we need the hidden treasure that gives meaning to life precisely when we are the most busy and hectic, not when we are brought to a halt by age or accident.
Depth of insight makes of us people with the right outlook on life; it puts joy in the way we live and empowers us in the face of whatever adversity we come across. Like Solomon, it is a wise and shrewd heart that enables us to undertake a discerned judgement of reality and helps us resist being blindly fed by the multitude of self-appointed opinion makers.
Faith is the standpoint from where we can have enduring insights on life without being at the mercy of how things turn out or how others make them turn out in the scenarios we inhabit. We may stumble on this treasure in various ways. It may be through a perfect storm or by accident or after years of intense searching and questioning.
The discovery of our own true self is a process of intense liberation from all that we own. At times we are simply owned by what we own. It is when we find this hidden treasure that things start falling into place and that we let our life be governed by a wise and shrewd heart. The Gospel provides clear signs that indicate whether or not we are on the right track of this hidden treasure that can transform our lives.
It is something we start treasuring in our heart, something we fear losing; it becomes a source of joy for us, and, compared with it, whatever we own would sound and look futile.