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25th
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C
Retreat for Peace & Justice Office
of Archdiocese of Chicago
September 22, 2013
Fundamental Option:
A Value That Drives Your Life
By (Rev. Msgr.)
Nicholas P. Amato
Three Family Fundamentals
There are within us principles or values that drive us.
They serve as guidelines, motivators, voices from the past that keep us moving
in a particular direction.
These principles or values – be they good or not so good –
are given to us by our parents and they orient us toward our affiliation with a
religion, the way we see outsiders, or our attitudes toward money or power.
So for example being raised in a lower middle-class
immigrant family, my brother, sister and I learned the value of a dollar.
There wasn’t a great deal of money in the household and we
all had jobs as kids. Each week we put $.50 away in our Christmas Club. The
value of working hard, saving and gifting others was a lesson well learned.
From our family vegetable garden, we were taught the
lesson of 1st caring for others even in little things. Each summer
as tomatoes were picked from the vines, my mother would line them up according
to quality.
The best tomatoes at this end, were always given away to
friends and neighbors, and the family ate the not-so-great ones at this end.
Sharing the little we had with others became a way of life.
A final example of a values learned at home had to do with
foreigners or outsiders.
Because we knew first-hand what the word “immigrant” meant
– both my parents were born in Italy – everyone who came to America looking for
opportunities to live a better life, everyone outside any number of circles
that could be drawn, was always welcomed and even admired by my parents.
The Fundamental Option
Now what my parents
taught us in those formative years regarding (1) Earning and saving of money,
(2) Growing and sharing tomatoes, and (3) Being proud as an immigrant family, was
crucial, for they gave us a fundamental way of being in the world as adults.
Catholic theologians
today would say that choosing those values to live by became our Fundamental
Option, our standard for making choices in our lives.
Those same theologians
would say that somewhere along the line as we grow, we all opt for a fundamental
choice or choose a fundamental option for our lives. This choice sets the basic direction, the guiding
theme, or the predominant value that will govern our actions.
And the choosing of
this Fundamental Option is prepared for, by the experiences in our childhood.
The Scriptures: Fundamental Option
It is today’s
Scripture passages that led me to share all of this.
In the Gospel, Jesus
says it in one cryptic sentence: “You
cannot serve God and Mammon.” The
word “mammon” means anything else
besides God that we make the center of our lives like money.
No, we cannot serve
both Jesus and something else. Somewhere
along the line we must make a choice about our life and its meaning, its
purpose, its direction.
Working hard, saving
money, using it to buy Christmas presents for others helped us as kids learn
early to serve God and not mammon.
Jesus again in the
gospel is also concerned about right and wrong in everyday life. He calls us to be honest and trustworthy.
If we can be honest
and trustworthy in small everyday matters, then God will give us even greater
things in days to come, here and hereafter.
What great trust was
borne in us of my mother’s tending the ripe tomatoes of our ordinary family
garden. In her choosing to share the best with others, she was modeling a great
option that we would one day embrace.
And finally, the
prophet Amos in the first reading focuses on our relationship with the greater
global community. He decries taking
advantage of, or neglecting the poor, the immigrant, the alien.
Amos calls us to
social justice – to sensitivity, compassion, and justice for those in need and
those outside our circles.
This opting for the
outsider draws us not only closer to the neglected, the excluded, the shunned,
but we become one with the God who is father of them all.
Conclusion
To conclude:
Our Fundamental
Option may not yet be complete or cast in stone, so there is always time to choose
to make God, Jesus and the Gospel the guiding force or norm for my life.
Without prayer and a
sense of connectedness to a community of faith, I can loose track of my Fundamental
Option or end up having a life-style contrary to it.
