Where is your Passion?

A homily from Sister Jen Frazer, OSB

Note: This reflection is based on the readings from Sunday, August 3, 2025: Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23, Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11, Luke 12:13-21

What message should today’s readings inspire? Maybe this: Life and toil are ultimately meaningless. Does this sound unlikely? Maybe what we consider meaningful is wrong. Ecclesiastes calls the whole of existence vanity, or as another translation has it – a chasing after wind. The rich man in the gospel parable was blessed with an unusually bountiful harvest. He planned to store up good fortune – to live in comfort and security for the remainder of his life – free from toil. The remainder of his life turned out to be a very short time. Ecclesiastes says, “there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves.” The gospel parable mocks this saying as folly.

As a well-trained but momentarily puzzled Biblical scholar, I sought guidance. I consulted the finest of Biblical scholarship I could find via Google search. This was vanity. I remained unsatisfied and puzzled. The message I found was not wrong: Do not hold on to material wealth. Sell everything and give to the poor. Rich men will have as much trouble entering heaven as camels getting through the eye of a needle, so try not to die rich. And so on. This is not completely terrible advice. But my instinct insisted on a more profound a message than some lukewarm variation of “be nice to others”.

Who ultimately cares what we do with our pile of stuff? If you need twelve pairs of shoes to be a good person, maybe you should admit this, and buy yourself twelve pairs of shoes. For most of us rich and poor are relative terms, and a platonic form of wealth and poverty does not exist. Who is so rich that they could not be richer – or so poor that they could not be poorer? Perhaps a better question: Where is our passion? Do we know our own deepest longings? Do we have the courage to, in the words of mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, “take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be”?

Who and what do we passionately love? And can we fearlessly declare this passionate love first to ourselves, and then to our fellow travelers? Whether we die with barns full of grain, or full of wind, makes no ultimate difference. St. Paul writes in First Corinthians: “If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” In ultimate terms what we do or do not do in this life means little compared with the more important question: Who are we becoming?

Photo by Jo Clarke, Erie Benedictine Oblate

These readings reminded me of a part of a book by Dorothy Sayers I read many years ago – Gaudy Night. In this part of the book two women at an Oxford college are having a philosophical discussion:

“If one's genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that's the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don't snatch; if you snatch, you don't really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it's a proof of its importance to you?”

“I think it is, to a large extent. But the big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound.”

“I saw six plays this winter in London,' said Harriet, 'all preaching the doctrine of snatch. I agree that they left me with the feeling that none of the characters knew what they wanted.”

“No,” said Miss de Vine. “If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller”

But is passion moral? Can one be both moral and passionate? There is a version of living the Christian path that says no. I would argue this philosophy is less Jesus Christ and more Enlightenment philosopher Immanual Kant. Virtuous living seems less morally worthy if it happens to be the life you most want to be living anyway. Christian life should entail a disciplined struggle against our passionate desires for immorality. If it doesn’t, where then is the sacrifice, the taking up of one’s cross?

Seeking a life in pursuit of pure reason is ultimately inhuman. Such pursuit leads to a life that might be labelled vanity of vanities. Wherever your deepest passions should take you, be honest enough to be bold. Have the courage to be either hot or cold and never lukewarm. As Paul wrote, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” No true creator creates without passion.

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AUTHOR

Erie Benedictine Sister Jen Frazer is an artist who shares her time with L’Arche Erie, and adjuncts in the Catholic Studies department at Mercyhurst University.