“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” So wrote St. Paul to the Colossians, reminding them that if they have been raised with Christ, then they should direct their minds and their lives toward him.
As I sat in the pew on Easter Sunday and listened to that passage for Colossians, I found myself wondering: Do I set my mind and life too much on things that are on earth? 
Some of the temptations are not easy to identify. Jesus tells us to lay up our treasure in heaven, and that seems to rule out thinking about bank accounts. But is that always true? My children are in college and tuitions bills need to be paid. It’s irresponsible for me never to think about my bank account. “Sorry, Rachel, meant to pay last semester’s tuition, but I laid up my treasure in heaven instead.” No, that won’t do. Whatever Jesus meant when he said that we must be ready to hate our mother and father, brother and sister, he wasn’t giving us an excuse to neglect our responsibilities to our families.
The same holds for our duties as citizens. There is something very wrong about investing politics with ultimate significance. As Jesus taught us, his kingdom is not of this world. He reigns from above, not in the halls of congress. But by the same token, elections matter, and not just a little. Deciding who sits on the United States Supreme Court makes a life and death difference for the unborn. It makes a difference for the future of marriage. Our solvency as a nation may very well turn on who gets elected to public office. The moral character of society is shaped by those in positions of public influence. There are many, many things on earth that rightly engage our minds. It would be irresponsible for us never to think about how to best serve the common good.
Which is why we publish First Things. The journal has an important goal: to help us think more deeply and responsibly about public life, not just about politics and policies, but also, and to my mind more importantly, about culture and the moral character of society.
Thus the spiritual difficulty that I often feel. How are we to think about our real worldly responsibilities without becoming worldly, without fixing our minds on the things that are on earth? As editor of First Things, do I set my mind too much on the things that are on earth?
I’m sure I do, but I’ve come to see that my failures do not stem from what I think about but from how I’m thinking. There is a worldly way of thinking—and there is a heavenly way.
The worldly way treats worldly powers as the ultimate judges of what is right, good, and possible. Wealth provides happiness. Your worth turns on your standing in society. Whoever controls the levers of government shapes the future. To think in a worldly way involves turning our concerns and problems over to these and other similar judgments—principalities and powers, to use the biblical terms. I do this often, and usually with the best of intentions. What investments should I make to ensure that I’m a good father who can pay for his children’s college tuitions? How should I frame the marriage debate in light of the upcoming elections so that First Things can play an effective role in restoring a culture of marriage? And so on, and so on. In each instance I’m trying to be responsible—something the Christian faith certainly encourages—but I’m going the temples of this world to supplicate it’s powers. I approach the altar of the marketplace, or I try to read the omens of electoral politics.
Death is the ultimate power of this world. No amount of wealth can turn it away, and even the most absolute despot is subject to its dominion. On Easter Sunday we say that Jesus Christ has risen, and in so doing we are announcing our freedom from death, the commanding general of all the worldly powers. That’s why St. Paul tells the Colossians to direct their thoughts to things above. “Your life,” he writes, “is hid with Christ in God.” In him we find our future, not in the powers of this world.
I often find myself humiliated at Mass by the awareness that my mind is preoccupied. Many, many times during the prayers of consecration I’ve caught myself thinking about how I’ve got to solve this or that problem. Money, reputation, politics: I’m in the temples of the gods of this world, propitiating them, negotiating with them, raging at them.
Then, suddenly, everyone around me is saying “Amen” and starting to rise for the Lord’s Prayer. I’m jarred out of my distracted preoccupations, my mental list-making, my ardent problem-solving. As I said, it’s a humiliating moment. The mystery of Christ made present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist is in front of me, and I’m off in my mind worshipping the gods of this world whom I tacitly presume control my future.
In that painful moment I try to follow St. Paul’s advice. I don’t stop thinking about my responsibilities. Instead, I refer them to Christ, asking him for guidance. And who better to know the answer? “He is before all things,” St. Paul writes earlier in Colossians, “and in him all things hold together.”
R.R. Reno is Editor of First Things. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
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Comments:
I live near you and though you don't know me I have admired you for some time. I too have felt that same humiliation at mass and had been troubled by it for decades. Then one day at mass at Christ the King, not my parish,
I noticed a lady deep in prayer after coming out of one of my many distractions. I envied her. I noticed how her hands were folded just like I was taught by Sr Georgegina, hands flat together from palms to finger tips pointing to heaven. I tried it. It wasn't comfortable. My arms didn't feel natural in that position. I also felt self conscious. But every time my mind would start to drift away, that discomfort brought me back. It is hard to describe the joy I receive at mass today. I barely control my joyful weeping.
I hope this might help. Take care and God bless.
Here is a great piece of reflection:
“Christianity is, among other things, the wonderfully good news that this life is not our whole story… The few years that we live in this body… are a kind of pilgrimage, a sojourn, a preparatory trip on the way to something much greater. For the Christian, this present existence is provisional. He is aware that every activity he undertakes is schooling for something else—that it is all directed toward a higher end.”
“For a person whose roots have been thoroughly transplanted from the present soil into that of eternity, who dances lightly on the surface of the earth and so is ready to leave at a moment’s notice, there would be little point in dwelling on the thought of death. Sad to say, however, this mind-set is rarely to be found among those who profess Christianity. Most churchgoers are as deeply rooted in this world, and thus as deeply in despair, as those who profess no such hope. Far from being an exercise in morbidity, a deepening acquaintance with our death and with the vanity of human wishes is for our worldly hearts a needed path to perfect health” (Robert C. Roberts, Spirituality and Human Emotion).
Steve Cornell
This is very true, and the best part of that promise is that what God adds unto us is often that which we didn't even know we needed, and He spares us what we only thought we needed, but really wouldn't have been all that good for us. Over time we learn to not even desire such things. This arrangement is great. (How could having an omniscient and omnipotent friend Who loves us mightily not be great?) But we really do have fulfill our end of the deal: "Seek ye FIRST the kingdom of God and His JUSTICE …"
We also have to keep in mind, of course, that His ways and His thoughts are higher above ours than the heavens are above the Earth. Which is why some of Christ's remarks seem so inexplicable at first:
“Amen, I say to you, there is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, who shall not receive much more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.”
Not that that relieves us of our obligations to such people. Christ didn't mean that at all. It is just that we must “Seek first the kingdom of God” for them, too, which sometimes looks to them like we are abandoning them. It seemed to the apostles – for a while – that Christ had chosen a path that amounted to abandoning them. It looked like that is exactly what had happened before the discovery of an empty tomb. He had been seeking first the kingdom of God for them.
I think Thomas More understood such things, as his seeking first the kingdom of God for his family and intimate friends looked to most of them like his abandonment of them and his failure to fulfill his obligations to them.
"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever"
My second thought:
"And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still."
These lines, of course, from Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot, respectively.
Strange, I committed those lines to memory some forty eight years ago in college and they come to mind every once and a while in life situations, but usually never together.
Mr.Reno your distracting experiences at Mass are identical with mine, as I'm certain they are with other academics, exexutives, middle managers, thinking-type general contractors and dock workers...really, just about anybody, I suppose.
Folding the wings of my mind on its own self-centeredness and stung with the pain, humiliation and embarrassment of these moments (in the Presence) I am usually relieved when I succeed in taking totally to heart, repeating silently in my mind, as I walk to Communion, the words of the Centurion "...Lord, I am not worthy..."
I suspect most of us students assumed the line was from Scripture, but it was from a poem by Sir Philip Sidney. I always found it inspirational and I guess most of my school mates did, too---although I do not remember discussing the quote while at school, at a recent 30- year reunion, it was cited by many as one of the fondest memories. It seems a good quote for any school, and certainly appropriate for a Christian one.
Hopefully in this new millennium we will be able to leave behind the crippling influence of Gnostic dualism and embrace the gestalt of Christ whose identity is revealed in his mission to the world, precisely where our identities reside in our mission to the world in Christ as his body, with Christ as head, which always and everywhere involves doing the will of the Father.
Because God desires that all be saved, His salvific work that we participate in involves sending us in our missions to the ends of the earth. He might send us to join democratic or republican parties, to be a professor at a university, or an entrepreneur, a king, queen or president, or a dish washer or homeless person. None of this has any value other than us taking on functional identities in order to be missionaries for God in his desire to save all. I have always been amazed how many innocent persons are sent to prison because of a flawed justice system, but am even more amazed that persons are sent to prison so that God will through them reach persons in that particular end of the earth.
To be a Christian is to humbly accept wherever God sends us, and it truly is irrelevant whether that entails being a billionaire or living in dire poverty (I think of how Tolstoy tortured his children, depriving them of material things to make them “better Christians”, and how Marx would do the same in his religious quest to make his children better communists). The only error we can make as Christians is to imagine our surface identities we embrace in going out to the ends of the earth are our ontological ground, which would involve subsuming our Christian identities in Christ as missionaries into any surface identity that in fact is merely an existential costume worn to be a particular person to particular persons in the world. From a Balthasarian perspective, being a missionary requires that we take on roles in God’s Theodrama and joyfully wear the required costumes as opposed to being the writer-director-actor-editor and costumer in our own willful productions. And the latter would always in reality not be our own dramatic production, but a production of Satan.
Wealth does not provide a happiness that enriches the soul, a happiness that can only come from sacrificial living, a being in service to family, friends and those in need (including those in a vast economic network where jobs are provided to those men and women pursuing a sacrificial life). Christianity is an incarnational religion where not only our souls but all of creation, every molecule, groans toward salvation, and our place as Christians is to occupy all places as guides to eternal happiness.
God's
2)Be in the world but not of the world.
3)Trust in God but tie your camel
Most magazines that mix faith and the world end up offering faith informed by the platforms of the Republican or Democrat parties. Being conservative but independent politically, having looked high and low for periodicals that are worth my time, I can say it's extremely rare to find a journal that truly offers politics and law and art and science--and all of these informed BY faith, not the other way around. In FT's finer moments, it offers all of these not just informed, but transformed by faith.
The editors of FT are doing something really special and unusual these days.
So, you know, keep it up.
I'm doing well on part 1, not well on part 2 so far. Prayer is regrettably still too far down on my real priority list. Pray for me on this if you'd like.