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Today is the infamous Black Friday for 2023. It is alleged that on this day many businesses achieve profitability for the year as the Christmas season starts. Yet this year, just as the secular Christmas shopping season replaced Advent, it seems "Black Friday" began, with a multitude of sales, just after Halloween. What is this telling us?
Perhaps one answer is found in the Gospel according to Luke (12:34) where Jesus tells his friends "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also". It seems that as individuals and a nation, we essentially treasure things and money. There is nothing essentially evil about either. With things, as with money, it is the unhealthy "love" of either that sets the stage for trouble.
Gift giving at Christmas is as old as the account if the Magi offering gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But in the 20th century, this Christmas gift-giving changed from token gifts of love and care to the expectation of a number of things. This continues to be fueled by an advertising industry that works tirelessly to convince us we cannot be happy without most of the "latest and greatest". It also works because we have a God-shaped hole in us that people try to fill with material "treasure" that we can see, hold, and own. In reality, no thing fully fills that God-shaped hole. So, we go on endlessly trying things that do not work, in the vain hope one will.
If we read a verse or two earlier in Luke we find Jesus' advice to his friends a bit clearer. He advises them to create "...unfailing treasure where no thief can steal and no moth destroys." So, what then is this treasure? And how do we create it?
Jesus is not speaking about physical treasurer at risk to thieves and moth's destruction. Rather, he is speaking about a way of living that flows from a spiritually formed life. We are not physical people who also have some sort of spiritual "soul". We are spiritual people who currently inhabit a physical form. Our task in this life is to learn how to become spiritual people open to the love, compassion, presence, and leading of God, which helps us fill that God-shaped hole.
Advent is offered to us as an annual "retreat" to ponder our spiritual growth and awareness, and to adjust our way of life to enable us to better tune into the unseen but genuine spiritual energy in the world around us.
A better path to a joyful life than sales, things, and money, is a grateful heart, and an ongoing intention to look for the spiritual signposts around us. These help form us and focus us to live into the example of Jesus, saints, and other spiritually awake and aware people who truly make a difference in the lives of others. And consequently, in our own as well.