ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!

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This morning, I had to celebrate mass for the Benedictine Sisters in Elizabeth, which meant that I had to come up with a homily based on the readings. I read both of them, but nothing catching my fancy. Then I discovered this interesting Greek noun that occurs in 1 Tim 6:6. The translation says “Indeed, religion with contentment is a great gain.” Don’t worry, I couldn’t understand what it meant, either!

Aristotle  384-322 BC

But I looked at the Greek word that was translated as “contentment” and found it was autarcheia. Maybe you can see that it’s made up of two words, autos (“self”) and archeia (“govern” - as in monarch). In any case it refers to a virtue found in such Greek philosophers as Aristotle and the Cynics and the Stoics; it means “the virtue of independence from material goods.”

The word really spoke to my heart: I can use some autarcheia myself, some “independence” --not from material goods,  in my case, but from everything that I depend on that is not God. I asked the Lord, as I sat staring at that word, to help me to be “independent” from all those emotions, influences, habits and so forth, that draw me away from depending on God.

I remember that commercial advertisements years ago would warn, “Accept no substitutes!” Now, like you, I know perfectly well that there are no substitutes for God, but that doesn’t always keep me from wandering off in pursuit of one or another substitute when God is not responding fast enough, or when God seems to have left me feeling unfulfilled. If autarcheia means “the virtue of independence from material goods,” then my version of the word would be “the virtue of independence from substitutes for God.”

Benedict was into autarchaeia

Can you imagine what we’d be like if we could pull off that virtue? The great saints are saints because they practiced this virtue, and accepted no substitutes for God. Let’s pray to our favorite saints to help us learn that sacred discipline ourselves, and “accept no substitutes.”