Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
One overarching theme that connects all of the Gospel readings this week is readiness. We are called to deeply reevaluate our priorities in daily life and ask ourselves some big questions. In today’s readings, we hear about a rich man who has collected such a bountiful harvest that he doesn’t even have room to store all of his grain and other goods. So what does he do? He builds bigger barns to accommodate his vast wealth so that he can retire and be comfortable for years to come.
The potentially uncomfortable reality is that this Gospel directly critiques several premises of the so-called “American Dream.” The very attitude that Jesus warns about has become the cultural norm in the West. Everyone is building bigger barns and bigger portfolios to store their wealth so that they can enjoy comfort and plenty in perpetuity.
To be clear, possessing wealth in and of itself is not inherently an evil. What matters is how we use the gifts we are given, and how we prioritize our attachments and interior desires. The fault of the man in the parable was that he was fixated on the comforts of the physical world. He was trying to make his own Heaven on Earth for himself via his wealth. And he became so focused on this project that he totally lost sight of the real objective of earthly life: to love God and one another to the fullest extent possible.