A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Somebody out of the multitude said to Jesus, teacher, bid my brother, divide the inheritance with me. But Jesus said to him, man, who made me a judge or divider over you? And then Jesus said to the crowd, take heed and beware of all covetousness. For a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.
And then Jesus told them a parable saying, the land of a rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do for I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones. And there, I will store all my grain, all my goods.
And then I will say to my soul, soul, you are you have ample goods now laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But god said to that man, fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things that you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. And this is the gospel of the Lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This parable and more than a parable because our blessed lord speaks directly to the crowd brings home a very salient point, but and that it's it's the one that we've heard so much, we get tired of it, and yet it's practically one of the well, it is one of the most essential truths of Christian living. Or as a great good old friend of mine used to say, quit odd eternity. What does this what meaning, what value has this for eternity? Whenever anything got tough for him, it was it was father Giselle.
Whenever and he had plenty of plenty of troubles. He built a whole parish. And when things were bad or weren't going well or anything, that was his phrase, quit ad eternitatio. What meaning what value has this for eternity? That we hear so we hear it so often that it just comes off of our backs like the proverbial water off the proverbial duck.
I wanna bring out this word soul here. Now the word soul occurs about four or five times in this text. And for example, it says, and I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods. Our lord says, fool, this night your soul is required of you. Now this is a tough subject, but it's, I think, frightfully important that we understand the situation here.
When the word soul, s o u l, I guess that's correctly spelled, when that word is used in the Old Testament and the New Testament, or in the epistles, or in the book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, in the book of revelation. When that word is used, inevitably, we're going to give a false meaning to it. You're going to think of it in the terms that you think of so and what that may be, I have no idea. Maybe you don't either. Maybe if you took a piece of paper about two by two inches and tried to write down on that vast space your concept of soul, you would wind up with still plenty of empty space.
I don't know. I don't know how much thought you've given to this idea of soul. I know this, that willy nilly and most unfortunately, we are victims today of a disastrous dichotomy in human beings. We talk about body and soul, matter and mind, soul and intellect, we even have a three, soul, intellect, and body. All of this is just so much disastrous garbage.
Because once you divide a person up like that, you never put him back together again, and the proof of it is since the reign of Descartes, 1596 to 1650. He wasn't the first. The basis of all of this stuff is Platonism, where that dear man had this concept of the human being, the self, the ego, as the soul living in the prison of the body. The body is a vile cell. It's like the shell holding the beam or the box holding the ornament or any words you wanna use.
The point is that this real self, the true self, the authentic ego is not your body, it is your soul. That's that endo. Now I'm not saying that play that Descartes got this from Plato, I'm saying that they they amount to the same thing. And what we are living with today is a tremendous backwash of Cartesianism, much of it coming through our seminaries. Now, when the word soul is used in the Old Testament and the New Testament, if you'll think of that in terms of your total and entire self, then you're closer to the truth of the matter.
When our blessed lord said, what will a man give for his soul? That's the way it's translated. I know what the Greek word is. The Greek word is. But the thing is, what does the word mean in this context?
Now, if there's anything we're perfect we're sure of is that in the Old Testament and the New Testament, you do not have this concept of the human being as some kind of a sandwich made up of body and soul with a little bit of ham put in the middle with mustard. That's one thing they didn't have, but that's one thing we do have, thanks chiefly at our times to Descartes, who was a well intentioned man and a genius. But he certainly erode the idealism to death. So whenever you have this word soul in the Old Testament and the New Testament, think of it in terms of your total self. Now this idea of the self, I can't stress it too much.
Not no longer than seventy two hours ago, that's three days I believe, I had an hour and a half conference with an intelligent young Catholic woman, and it was news to her when I tried to tell her that the only reality sitting in that chair was that girl named I don't know what her name was, of course I know what I'm telling you. But the thing is, that was news to her. She said, then what happens to this idea of my being body and soul? You see how and once you once you think of yourself in terms of body and soul, think of some of the consequence. What holds this stuff together?
And if you say it is my body and my soul, who is the my? Tell me. I'm interested. So and this is the this is one of whatever you may get out of the holy father's very thick book on phenomenology of the human personality, because that's what it's what it is. This is the thing he's driving home all the time is, as he calls it, the unrepeatable reality of the human person in our totality, in the totality of our of our of our senses, our our emotions, our passions, our joys, our sorrows, our extended bodies, our weight, everything, our imagination, our intellect, all of what we call our spiritual faculties, all of these things cannot be divorced really, from the self, from the ego, from you.
And you may say this is a lot of academic theoretical nonsense. There is nothing more important because all of this terrible, terrible persuasion that some people have that matter is sinful, then you get into this whole business of sex being dirty, it all comes from this business of dividing man into body and soul, including women. Right back to Plato, but we get it mostly from Descartes. But the thing is, when our when when our lord in these parables, when he speaks of the soul, he's talking about the you in your entirety. That's important.
But what works what he says because it we can summarize what he's saying now. What will you give in exchange for what? For your total self. And remember, our blessed lord as savior came to save me in my total self. Not as a disembodied spirit, not as some kind of a separated substance, not as an pure intellect and all of that sort of thing, but as a human being, as a human being, and as Saint Thomas develops it, a human being instead of following Aristotle, be man being a rational animal, Saint Thomas brings it from the top down and say and says that man is an incarnate angel.
Think about that, that we are an incarnate, an angel put into flesh and meat. Carne, you know what the word carnus is means meat, means flesh. So take this to heart. When you think of yourself, think of yourself as a totality. Every good doctor knows this, I mean an MD.
The man who treats your foot, you better get a good physician. You are not your foot, and a physician is treating you to totality. You know, we call this, I think, holism today. Well, I don't care what you call it. The thing is, what we have to realize is the reality of the self, of the human self, the individual human self.
Not some abstract generality, but the individual you with your unique and as Paul says unrepeatable history. That's one word he likes, at least it's in the English translations. My Polish isn't too good these days. And but that's one of his favorite, the unrepeatable self. You in your totality.
And that is the you that you come into this church with. It's the you you pray with and enjoy with and you have pleasure with and you are sad with, and it's the you that we hope joins god for eternity. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.