What Must I Do?
"Good
teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10:17)
This past week, I spent five
days on retreat with about 40 of my brother priests from the Archdiocese of
Miami. I’ve been on these retreats
before with other priests and it never ceases to amaze me how serious we take
these moments of solitude with God. Our
retreat master was Archbishop Harry Flynn, the archbishop-emeritus of Minneapolis,
who I heard speak up in the Twin Cities 6 years ago and is a truly gifted
speaker. I witnessed 40 priests who
preach the gospel every day, witness to Christ every day, who know what it
takes to be a good Christian, approach this retreat with the same question that
the man in today’s gospel posed to Jesus:
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Like the man, we know the answer, but as
priests, we must run to the Master to be reminded. This is why we go on retreat: to be reminded of these truths that help us
inherit eternal life, to be reminded of God’s wonderful love for us, to be
reminded of his endless mercy, to be reminded that we have received true richness
in Christ’s gift to us of the priesthood, and to be reminded that as men of God
in a secular world, we must rededicate ourselves all the more to prayer for our
people.
All of us here are like this
man in the gospel. We approach the Lord
asking him “What must I do?” We
genuinely want him to tell us what we must do to please him, to honor him, and
to gain for ourselves admittance into the kingdom of heaven. We ask this question because we honestly
don’t know the answer. We come before
the Lord with humility and he gives us the answer, but we look back and realize
that we are very much tied down to the world.
This gospel is not so much about being rich in wealth, but about letting
the things of this world hinder us from a life totally dedicated to God. The tragedy of this story is that the rich
man could not detach himself from his possessions. Jesus looked on him and loved him. Notice that little detail that St. Mark
throws in there. He looked on him and
loved him. That is how he looks on every
one of us as he calls us to enter into a deeper relationship with him. But what is holding us back? What is distracting us?
An entire day of our retreat
was dedicated to the importance of prayer in our lives. We all expect our priests to be men of
prayer. I pray every day not only in
Mass but before the Blessed Sacrament as well.
Yet, I always feel like I should be dedicating more time to praying for
all of you and to listening to the Lord.
Archbishop Flynn began his talk on prayer by telling us quite boldly,
“Until you are convinced that prayer is the best use of your time, you will never
have time for prayer.” I spent most of
that day meditating on those words and thinking about all the time I literally
waste on trivial things, which is time that I could be spending before the Lord
the Blessed Sacrament. When you’re on
retreat it is easy to enter into prayer, but when you’re in your room
surrounded by your possessions and your gadgets and your computer and TV and
other things that distract from a deeper prayer life, it’s not so easy. Detachment from the material is necessary. Each of us clings to things of this world
that prevent us from entering more fully into the mystery of God’s love. “What must I do?” you ask. Spend an extra few minutes in prayer each
day. Be alone with God. Disconnect yourself from this world and be
one with Him. It is in prayer that we
find answers because not only are we speaking to God, but more importantly, he
is speaking to us.
I want to end with one last
anecdote about our retreat. On that day
that was dedicated to prayer, we concluded it with a reconciliation
service. I sat in the back of that chapel
and watched as each one of your priests humbly went before one of the
Passionist Fathers who were hosting us to receive the Sacrament of
Reconciliation. It is there in that
confessional that we accomplish total detachment because we are no longer
weighed down by our sins. Once we are
not weighed down with our sins or the things of this world, we can approach the
Lord and genuinely ask him with an open heart, “What must I do to inherit
eternal life?”
