Here is a photo taken by Bob Speel (his website about sculpture in England). We see a squirrel with a great fluffy tail sitting on an Oak Leaf branch and eating acorns. He will undoubtedly not only eat the acorns but save or store up some for the lean winter months. Are you reminded of the saying of Jesus in St. Matthew's Gospel (6:19-21)?
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
We hear of some Catholics who curiously "store up" indulgences or graces. As if these are commodities to be placed in the supermarket cart. One family told me after a funeral that they had received cards totally 119 Masses — as if they now had a sort of spiritual bank account from which they could make withdrawals. Odd.
Did you take notice of the last gospel verse above? We think the Christian religion is about believing truths, studying and memorizing. But Jesus tells us the Christian experience is about the heart. An elderly woman told me that when she presented herself as an adult to be received into the Catholic Church, the local pastor handed her a catechism and told her to study it. When she returned some weeks later he asked her a first question from the book. A bundle of nerves, she hesitated, at which he snapped, "If you know it, you can say it." How did our religion ever get reduced to that? What about the things of the heart? Can we even imagine it?
What might Jesus' words mean — store up for yourselves treasure in heaven? Americans are always looking for more storage space. There are stores and companies dedicated to storing things. Jesus thinks this is wrongheaded. Some people become sick with it all — they're called hoarders. We even have TV shows about it — turning a sickness into TV entertainment.
I think "storing up treasure for heaven," might mean the reflective treasuring of life-moments where I remember myself to have been absorbed by the things of God — taken away, up and into the things of God. Treasuring that time when I knew myself to be in God's embrace as a heart-learner.
In the early 1970's I was a seminarian studying in Yonkers, New York. When summer came around we were expected to vacate the enormous place and find employment in our home parishes. But for me that would have meant returning home on Long Island, which I wasn't interested in doing and hoping to work around the parish of my boyhood —a huge factory like parish with a rectory of uninspiring priests.
I remembered that in the 1950's it was the traditional summer work of seminarians to cut grass in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Maybe they helped with digging graves and burying the dead, I don't know, but I figured I could work there. I liked being outdoors. I liked gardening. I liked solitude. I got the job (unbeknownst to the seminary administration) and began taking care of an enormous section which took two weeks to cut with a gas push mower and a pair of sheep shears hand scissors. When I wasn't pushing the mower I was on my hands and knees edging around hundreds of headstones in dozens of long rows. Every summer weekday morning I was on the road in my yellow Volkswagen during the A.M. rush hour into Queens. I lived hidden away in the great empty seminary, with no recollection of how I ate, except that a priest friend brought me a sandwich and beer every day which I had for lunch under a tree at the edge of the cemetery. Unfortunately, the beer and the afternoon sun (no hat) made the remaining hours very difficult.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately — kind of storing it up — considering it to have been one of the most important bits of my life. I would suggest that every seminarian work in a cemetery for at least one summer before ordination. I read every headstone in my section. I wondered about the lives of the people whose photographed faces were mounted in porcelain ovals on the headstones. There were headstones remembering buried infants and young children, headstones of people who had died during the great flu epidemic, graves of soldiers, priests and husbands and wives. I calculated how long the remaining spouse lived without the other. Some headstones carried a bible or poem verse honoring some lovely virtue or quality. Enormous mausoleums, honoring the memory of "important" people, showed signs of disintegration.
Those summer days were wearying, tedious, blistering, sun-burning and dehydrating. More importantly though, the two summers were soul-formative: the eight hour workday, the drive back north and the evening and night spent in silence. I didn't feel lonely, but enriched and deeply connected to the things of the heart: pondering and honoring peoples' lives, taking care of graves, cutting grass, watering the plants families planted, waving hello to visitors, appreciation of a tree's shade and the heat-breaking cold water from the hose poured over my neck and wrists. My religion is the storing up of gratitude and gratitude is "of the heart."
