Psalm 49: 1-20

Some of us have perhaps read the Leo Tolstoy short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” In the story a peasant named Pahom is lured by his greed (and is led astray by the devil) to acquire as much land as possible to have as his prized possession. Through various twists and turns Pahom continues to seek more and more, ever and only satisfied with what he has for only short periods of time. And as many of us know as the story concludes, Pahom’s greed has caused him to work so relentlessly for more, more, more that the efforts in the end cost him his life and he drops dead and is buried by a servant. And Tolstoy’s final line of the story is also the final answer to the story’s title question: How much land does a man need? “Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.”

This rather lyric (albeit not per se Christian) passage from James W. Jones in his book In the Middle of This Road We Call Our Life represents what we might all hope could happen to those willing to examine their own lives but that too often may not happen, especially to those too busy being distracted by their wealth to bother with such ponderings: “Growing up, children may learn to speak of God, envisioning God within the limits of their cognitive frame perhaps as a giant man (or woman) who lives above the clouds in a great white palace. Children talk to their God as they do to their teddy bears, consulting ‘him’ about the weighty matters of childhood. But the time comes when children trudge off to school and leave behind the enchanted Eden of their private world. There they learn that beyond the clouds are only limitless curves of space bending back on themselves: no great white palace, no friendly giant God, only the infinite, still emptiness. Gradually the child, now become a young man or woman, may cease to speak of God at all. But perhaps one day,...

“Growing up, children may learn to speak of God, envisioning God within the limits of their cognitive frame perhaps as a giant man (or woman) who lives above the clouds in a great white palace. Children talk to their God as they do to their teddy bears, consulting ‘him’ about the weighty matters of childhood. But the time comes when children trudge off to school and leave behind the enchanted Eden of their private world. There they learn that beyond the clouds are only limitless curves of space bending back on themselves: no great white palace, no friendly giant God, only the infinite, still emptiness. Gradually the child, now become a young man or woman, may cease to speak of God at all. But perhaps one day, when staring into the face of his or her own newborn child, or when engulfed by the fierce beauty of the raging ocean or the soaring stillness of the mountains, or when confronted by the grave into which parents or friends have tumbled, or wrestling with recalcitrant fears and anxieties that leap unbidden from the caverns of the mind, the young man or woman, now become an adult, discovers that he or she has (in William James’s words) ‘prematurely closed his accounts with reality’ and that there is more to reality than can be dreamt of in any one philosophy. And the grown child may again speak of God, not as a giant in a palace beyond the clouds or a great policeman in the sky but as a way of connecting with the sacred mystery that surrounds us.”