Essential Wisdom From Archbishop Chaput

by ICL Editor | June 3, 2010 9:00 am

One of my favorite books is Archbishop Charles Chaput’s Living the Catholic Faith: Rediscovering the Basics.  [1]I was reviewing the book yesterday when I came across this bit of helpful wisdom in Chapter 7, p.106:

It is ironic.  Many of us spend a good deal of our lives accumulating stuff.  What the “stuff” is will differ from person to person.  Yet at the end of our lives, it’s all finally the same junk.  It piles up in bookcases, in garages, in boxes in the attic, in the secret places of our souls.  As life’s evening sets in, we see the need to begin to detach.  The things we’ve accumulated are distractions.  They should become less and less important.  We need to strip them away–the layers of our life–until, at the very end, all that is left is God and us.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:3).  Thus, I suspect that poster–“Whoever dies with the most toys, wins”–should really read, “Whoever dies with no toys, wins.”

Source URL: https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2010/06/essential-wisdom-from-archbishop-chaput/

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