I am not sure that any of us knows what, exactly, it means to be rich toward God, let alone how to do it. I have, however, come up with a surefire solution for this: God simply needs to give each of us a lifetime of being fabulously wealthy. Living that lifetime, we would surely learn what it is to be rich, and then, perhaps, we could spend another lifetime figuring out how to apply that toward God. Actually, I suspect that life may be arranged to teach exactly that.
The American explorer of religion and myth, Joseph Campbell, spoke, I think in one of his interviews with Bill Moyers, about how at his late time of life, he was encountering a new developmental stage, one in which the task was simply to be. Towards the end of life, either by the accumulation of experience or by the sense of the closeness of its ending, it becomes clear that every moment really is a gift, and a gift for us to play with as we would please. These gifts are too few and, at times, too many, but they really are gifts.
We are always rich in being, although we know not how.
***
The man in the crowd at the start of our Gospel does not really want to accept the gift of life, not as it is, not in the messy and relational here-and-now.
Rather than speak with his family, however lovely or awful we might imagine them to be, he wants to arrange the outcome in advance, and to pick a mediator who will intervene on his behalf. It’s not justice or equitability that he seeks, but control. It would be intolerable for him to stand before his brother and to not know how it was all going to end up.
***
The rich man, too, prefers control to being. His land produces abundantly, in fact so abundantly that he can imagine he might need nothing more — except for the fact that the produce will eventually rot, and he doesn’t really have enough room to keep it. He has a great idea, speaking to himself and scheming privately about what his life will be like: he will tear down his barns and build great storehouses which will ensure that he has enough forever.
His life, though, is at its end. The barns have been destroyed, the produce awaits its harvest in the fields, and wealth no longer has anything to do with him. Everything he used to control the shape of his life is now irrelevant, but it does have some bearing on those who come after him.
There is a particular sort of mindset that I see at work, particularly, in how he imagines that he must tear down his old barns in order to build new ones.
He is, in fact, being wasteful with what he has, because of the temptation of what he imagines he will have. It doesn’t matter what you do with the unsatisfying things that really exist, because the promise of things to come is so much better.
This is no way to live. This is a common way to live.
***
When the first European settlers arrived at the southern tip of what we now might call Victoria, they saw the vast expanse of beautiful meadows glowing with an incredible blue and purple. They had arrived at the time of the ḰL̵O,EL bloom, and they declared that what they saw before them was beautiful and pristine, like the untouched Garden of Eden itself. They saw Heaven in the fields of camas.
Those fields were quickly claimed and appropriated for other uses, and confined to a small area we now call a park, set below a defensive lookout which stares outwards towards a sea that could well be a source of invading threats. Some camas does bloom there, but the pristine fields have been disrupted, confined, and removed from their former context.
When it was my fourth Spring living here, I was delighted to watch camas bloom in a small area near our house. I had lived for over a decade in Coast Salish lands, and always heard and knew about camas as at the heart of trade and agriculture and culture, but had never actually seen it grow. Here, at last, it was flourishing, and I was delighted.
In fact, beyond being delighted, I felt proud: we had tended to this land so well, that this beautiful and sacred plant had returned. That Spring, as I felt such great pride and delight, I did some research on the propagation of camas, that we might encourage it to spread further and further on this land we call home. What I found was disappointing: camas has a five year lifecycle from seed to flower, and whatever we now saw blooming was there before we ever began to be responsible for that patch of land. It must have been there all along, and we simply had not known it.
***
It is the gift of being that is abundant and provides our riches. The land produces abundantly from time-to-time, and this is a blessing and a gift, but it is a relational one. Our excess is an opportunity to share, and our wealth is in our connections with others, not something we can store up in secure facilities where nothing can ever touch it, and no one can ever reach us.
The rich man seeks to establish a way to live in which he will want for nothing, and need nothing, and this is not actually what life is like, and it is also what life is already like.
Our efforts at control are always illusions, fantasies which have no bearing on reality, and remove us from seeing and knowing who and whose we really are. The land will yield its abundance, as it always does, but not always by producing that which we think we need. What we have right now, we may not have tomorrow, and we also may have for years and years.
The man in the crowd wants to know how it all turns out before the journey even begins, and to make sure that things will go his way, when he may not yet even know what his way would be.
We are rich in God’s sight, but we do not know it. Being itself is such a phenomenal gift, beyond our ability to know or measure, but we partake in it and share of it in ways that are anxious, destructive, and mean. To be rich toward God is simply to live, and life is not about power or control or wealth or food, nor what we can build, nor what we can destroy. Life is bound up in how we relate to one another, the meaning we pursue, create, and discover. Life is bound up in so many things, but not in anything that can be stored up. It is here and now, and we are rich.
May you know the blessing of your life, and all life, always.