Weekly HOMILY for August 1, 2010: Projecting the Present into the Future

18th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle C
August 1, 2010
St. Margaret Parish, Bel Air

Projecting the Present into the Future
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


Write a Latter

Last September, at the beginning of the school year, the chaplain at a high school in Massachusetts gave an assignment to the students.

The chaplain began: “In fifteen years from now you’ll be in your unimaginable thirties somewhere. That’s worth thinking about.

“What will you remember about this year, I wonder? Will you remember important things or, like me, only disconnected bits and pieces of things like part of a movie you saw?

“I am asking you to write a letter today to the person you will have turned into fifteen years from now. Picture what you might look like, how you might be dressed.

“First, write this letter to yourself about the kind of person you are today, right now.

“Second, write to yourself about the kind of person you want to be, fifteen years from now.

“Write about who the person is right now that you would rather spend a day with more than anyone else in the world.

“Write to yourself about what you hope you will be doing with your life fifteen years from now.

And write about the kind of thing you hope you won’t be doing.

“Write to yourself about the last thing that made you cry and the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen up to now.

Write about the nicest thing someone has ever done for you and the nicest thing you have ever done for somebody else.

“Write all this to yourself and give the letter to someone to mail to you sometime in the year 2025.

My bet is that it will turn out to be one of the most interesting and useful letters you will ever receive.”


All of Us Write

I am thinking that each of us, regardless of our age, might consider writing a letter like this.

The point of the chaplain’s assignment is to help the students realize how precious and fragile and short our life is. We can get so caught up in the busyness and activities of living and only skim the surface of our life.

We can allow ourselves to be ruled by the pursuit of jobs and things to buy and places to go. Very often all of this busyness and activity really ends up stealing our time and attention from those we love and who love us.

The result is that we live our lives as if:
➢ There will always be time “later on” to do the things our schedules force us to put off
➢ We can always make it up to our loved ones tomorrow or this weekend
➢ Or as soon as this project is done there will time to relax

But we all know too well there is always something else we just have to do, someplace else we just have to go, and on and on it goes.


All Is Vanity…Wake Up

Today’s Scripture passages try to wake us up to all of this.

The wisdom writer in the first reading has come to see so much of this activity in life as “vanity,” as foolishness – that’s his rather negative way of looking at things.

Jesus in the Gospel calls our preoccupation with so many things as “foolish.”

And Saint Paul in the second reading gives us the positive direction for approaching life. “Seek what is above. … Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.”

His point is that our lives are about:
➢ Finding and embracing the selfless love of God
➢ Discovering how to love one another as God loves us in Jesus
➢ Being God’s beloved children, being brothers and sisters to one another, even being brothers and sisters to all God’s children on this earth
➢ Living in the love and compassion of God

That is what I hope we will write in our letters for fifteen years from now

It’s an exercise you might try today.