It is safe to say that there is much confusion about what is needed for life and what is really important for life. What we now call needs were formerly wants, and these needs have moved to such a level of sophistication that now luxuries are “necessities” for many of us. This keeps us quite trapped and un-free, and inherently unsatisfied.
Meanwhile, many of God’s people on this earth merely survive and even starve; most of God’s people have to learn to find happiness and freedom at a much simpler level. What Gospel wisdom is saying, of course, is that such simplicity is the only place that happiness is ever to be found in the first place. We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible, based largely on having instead of being.
We are so overstimulated that the ordinary and the commonplace no longer delight us, and ever-higher dramas are created to make us feel alive and important. How foolish that we do this to ourselves and to our children
— Fr. Richard Rohr - Daily Meditation - 12/16/10
