Homily for Tuesday of the 8th week in Ordinary Time, 30 May 2023, Mk 10:28-31
St. John of the Cross, in his spiritual writings, describes the spiritual journey of a Christian as a symbolic mountain climb. He calls it an ascent to divine life, and refers to the destiny as the TODO, meaning, EVERYTHING—which stands for God, or divine life with God. But he warns the traveler that the journey has to pass through a long and circuitous path with many stops that he labels at each time as NADA, meaning NOTHING. He even made a sketch of the itinerary for this journey and calls it THE ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL, which he imagined as the symbolic mountain that we all have to learn to climb, if we are to take our Christian discipleship seriously.
St. John shared this spirituality with St Teresa of Avila, his fellow Carmelite. Both are now known reformers of the Order. She summarized it in her own words when she wrote that famous poem entitled NADA TE TURBE. In the poem, she admonishes people to allow NOTHING to unsettle them. Nothing—that is how she labels practically anything in this passing world. She says, “Whoever has God wants for nothing.” In other words, he has has everything. She also says “everything (in this world) is passing, (while) God is unchanging.” And so she concludes, SOLO DIOS BASTA, “God alone is enough.”
I think this Carmelite spirituality captures well what Jesus is trying to say, in response to Peter in today’s Gospel. Without asking it directly, Peter is practically saying to Jesus, “Lord, we’ve given up everything; what do we get in return?” In the vocabulary of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Jesus would have said, “What you say you’ve given up are NOTHING; what God has in store for you is EVERYTHING.
His point is, “Whoever has God, has everything.” In fact we can only truly enjoy the passing things in this world, if we do not treat them as our everything. Otherwise, if you lose them, you are lost. Knowing that only God is your everything makes us appreciate everything in this world for its relative worth. It also makes the giving up much easier, because you know you are aiming for eternity.
