RECOGNIZING TREASURE
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
July 26, 2020
When I was a kid, I had at least a couple of collections. First
it was baseball trading cards. Maybe you remember the days when kids could pay
ten cents at the drug store for a packet of Fleer chewing gum, which was this
awful, brittle, pink square of industrial wax – but which was worth it because
there was also a baseball card inside, with a picture of the player on one side
and all of his statistics on the other.
I didn’t buy those things by the packet; I bought them by
the box – 20 at a time, with the money I made delivering newspapers for the
Minneapolis Afternoon Star. I had amassed quite a large collection of cards by
the time I went off to college, which was when my younger brother stole them
and sold them off to one of his friends.
We’ve reconciled since then. Most of them were never very
valuable anyway, though they seemed so at the time. But I’ll bet at least
several of them would be worth some money today. I will never know.
A later collection of mine was of postage stamps from around
the world. I was a genuine philatelist! I had this gigantic album of stamps
that I’d send away for as often as I could afford to. They’d arrive in the mall
from whatever vendor advertised in the back of boys’ magazines.
Before long I had pages and pages of stamps from countries in
Africa, Asia, the Soviet Union, and Latin America. I was amassing a treasure in
that book – or so I thought at the time. It took a while for me to figure out
that a collection of cancelled stamps, that had been produced by the millions
overseas, may have felt exotic, but was ultimately no of much enduring value.
I gave away the whole collection to a kid in the school
where I first served as a priest. He was overjoyed. I was relieved. There may
have been one or two stamps in that album – among the hundreds – that was
actually worth something, but I’ll never know.
The thing about any competent collector of things, or
curator of things, whether it be baseball cards or stamps, or fine art, or
cars, or even friendships, is that you have to be able to recognize what you
are looking at. You have to be able to distinguish what is of true enduring
value from what just seems to be so, or maybe not even that.
In each of the gospel parables today from Matthew, Jesus is
presenting the Kingdom of Heaven as a thing of supreme value – a treasure in a
field, a pearl of rare value, a good fish. It is that for which any disciple
should be ready to forsake absolutely everything else in order to obtain. It is
life itself.
But all of that presumes that the searcher first has the
ability to distinguish what is real treasure from what Is not. If one were to
dig up a field – especially in Israel at the time of Jesus, one would be likely
to find all kinds of buried things – most of which would not be regarded as
treasure by the person with the skilled eye.
And a buyer of pearls would quickly be able to distinguish a
rare or valuable one from all the rest.
And a seasoned fisherman (or fisherwoman) would be able to
sift through a net of fish and to decide what to keep and what to keep and what
to throw out. I know I wouldn’t be able to do that wisely, because I don’t know
fish. To me, a fish is a fish.
So how do you get there? How do you acquire the discerning
heart, the wise eye, the prudent judgement about what to hold on to, what is
worthy of sacrifice and even suffering in order to retain as real treasure? It
begins with a humble heart, with recognizing what you know that you don’t yet
know, and then attaching yourself to people and to traditions and to
communities that can actually impart wisdom, because they have learned things
along the way. None of us accomplishes this all alone.
The one who puts absolute trust in his or her own unfettered
judgement – especially if that person is young and unproven – is at great risk
for getting it wrong. For most of us it takes the experience of having
misidentified what actually is true treasure, or of having mistaken the
exceptional pearl for the ordinary one, the good fish from the junk fish, the
priceless relationship from the superficial one – it takes that to make us
truly understand.
This wisdom may have been behind God’s praise today for the
young King Solomon in the first reading (from 1 Kings). When allowed to ask for
any gift in the world, Solomon asked the Lord for an understanding heart, in
order to be able to distinguish right from wrong. He knew what he didn’t know,
and what he could never know apart from God and from experience.
None of which is to say that age and experiences is the
guarantee of wisdom – only that it can be. That depends on the disposition of
our hearts. Sometimes age only makes us more brittle or stubborn, or more
convinced that we already know it all, based on our own skills alone.
King Solomon himself was eventually deposed in his old age
because he’d forgotten the wisdom that he once had as a youth – that God alone
is treasure. If our hearts remain supple, our Lord will show us – day by day,
year by year, what is truly to be valued, and clung to above all else.
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