Rich With Virtues
Hi, this is Ann Mary Mullane for Sunday to Sunday Witness. I would like to introduce you to a four-episode mini-series by Father Matt Pennington, the pastor of the Nativity of our Lady Catholic Community in San Louis Obispo, California. Father Matt is also featured on a Sunday to Sunday video episode that you may enjoy from our website.
When I was in high school, I was a part of my parish youth group, and there was a young girl who was in the group with me who was an only child and came from a seemingly very ordinary family. They had an ordinary suburban home. They did not take extravagant vacations. They didn't have new cars. There were no servants in the house.
It's just an ordinary middle-class suburban existence. In fact, when she went to college, she had to have a part-time job to help with her expenses, and later when she married she and her husband were struggling to try to acquire their first home. Her parents didn't step in to help financially in any way, and about 10 years ago, her mother and father were killed in, a very tragic automobile accident on a freeway.
And as the estate was being settled, she was shocked to find that her parents had left her a fortune. Millions and millions of dollars, and not just money, but they had established, a foundation for outreach that she was now responsible for as an only child and the soul inheritor of the estate. Her first reaction to this was, was anger.
Why hadn't, her parents told her? Why had they not prepared her for this occurrence? Why hadn't they helped her? Why had it been necessary for her to work her way through school? Why had it been necessary for she and her husband to struggle in the purchase of their home, and the raising of their children?
She was bewildered. So last winter, I happened to see her at a social gathering when I was home visiting my family. 10 years after the death of her parents and it was very clear to me that everything had changed for her. That in fact, the very thing that had angered her and bewildered her, she now perceived as a great gift.
She said to me, my parents taught me things I never would've learned. I learned ingenuity. I learned economy. I learned moderation. I learned how to stand on my own two feet. It's a gift that I would never have gotten had they bestowed all of these riches upon me throughout my life. The gift, the real inheritance was not the money, it was the way they raised her and all that they taught her.
It seems to me that, that that story really dovetails with this teaching of Jesus today, which we call the beatitudes. The Beatitudes are not really just exclusively referring to this particular passage, but rather it is a term we use, to describe praise for people who live a virtuous life. Jesus is saying today that the way that we need to live our lives is in seeking to be virtuous people.
That to be poor in spirit, to be meek, to be humble, to hunger and thirst for the righteousness of others, to be merciful, to be clean of heart, to work for peace is something that will cause us to be rewarded in the next life. An eternal reward. The problem, of course, is that we live in a world that does not value these virtues.
We live in a world, and the world has always been this way that honors and respects money and power, and prestige. And so it takes a remarkable person to be able to look beyond, the issues of this world and to seek the riches of the next. Do you understand me? We get so steeped up in this world that we forget about the next.
It seems to me that's who the Saints are. They are those people who, in spite of all of the temptations and distractions of the world, were able to look beyond and to see what's important. What is eternal. What is of God. The Saints are people who understand that the God relationship is the primary relationship.
It is the relationship that is going to bridge us from this life into the next. And that's why we a, as a church, honor the saints because of their wisdom, because of their virtue, because of their selflessness, because of the ways that they inspire and encourage us to seek the things of God. We live in communion with them, and so what we believe is that in spite of tremendous temptation, we are never alone.
I hope you enjoyed this episode from the homilies of Father Matt Pennington. His homilies provoke reflection, inspire and entertain. If you would like to hear more from him, you could visit frmatthomilies.podcastpeople.com. A link to podcast people is also included in our show notes. This is Ann Mary Mullane for Sunday to Sunday witness from Carney, New Jersey.
