sealchan
Well-Known Member
What is a "treasure in heaven"? According to Jesus here is what it is not...something subject to physical decay or to thievery. But what can be said in a more positive sense about our heavenly treasures? Is there inherently no physical quality to them at all? How are they personal acquisitions?
I've been thinking about what I collect...I try to minimize this and make it as practical as possible, but such is the pull of the physical world...still, one of my collections is books. These are not a worldly wealth so much as a wealth of experience, of knowledge. As such their value is not in their physical form.
The books and, I should say, the movies I collect sit on the shelf together. They point to my deep interest in the human story as told by story-tellers, scientists and historians. For me, one of the greatest experiences is to enter one of these stories and get lost for a time. Events of great magnitude then take place before me with small details and an epic outcome. This is first and foremost my church.
Last year my home fell within the range of a level 2 evacuation due to the threat of local fires in the National Forest where I live. I had to confront the possibility of losing all of my worldly possessions as I could not move them. Well, I could have tried to move them but the effort was far greater than my desire to do so. I thought about how I kept a list of those books and movies I have on my shelf and this was a great comfort to me. It did not matter so much that I might lose this investment. I knew that I could find them all again.
This further taught me the value of "the Cloud" that nebulous place that invites us all to store our data, even our identity. I had that list of epic books and movies in a document in the cloud. No fire could take that from me as I am sure that Google (my service provider for this online storage of documents) surely has a hot backup facility and redundant servers on the internet. Now theoretically a catastrophe large enough could effectively destroy all the digital manifestation of that document, but how large of a threat is this?
So it is with this recent experience of mine that I think, "What are the treasures?" Are they abstract human attitudes and virtues such as those psychological qualities that Jesus tells us about in the Beatitudes, or can they be something more specific, yet ephemeral, such as a list pointing us to the path of our own identity?
I've been thinking about what I collect...I try to minimize this and make it as practical as possible, but such is the pull of the physical world...still, one of my collections is books. These are not a worldly wealth so much as a wealth of experience, of knowledge. As such their value is not in their physical form.
The books and, I should say, the movies I collect sit on the shelf together. They point to my deep interest in the human story as told by story-tellers, scientists and historians. For me, one of the greatest experiences is to enter one of these stories and get lost for a time. Events of great magnitude then take place before me with small details and an epic outcome. This is first and foremost my church.
Last year my home fell within the range of a level 2 evacuation due to the threat of local fires in the National Forest where I live. I had to confront the possibility of losing all of my worldly possessions as I could not move them. Well, I could have tried to move them but the effort was far greater than my desire to do so. I thought about how I kept a list of those books and movies I have on my shelf and this was a great comfort to me. It did not matter so much that I might lose this investment. I knew that I could find them all again.
This further taught me the value of "the Cloud" that nebulous place that invites us all to store our data, even our identity. I had that list of epic books and movies in a document in the cloud. No fire could take that from me as I am sure that Google (my service provider for this online storage of documents) surely has a hot backup facility and redundant servers on the internet. Now theoretically a catastrophe large enough could effectively destroy all the digital manifestation of that document, but how large of a threat is this?
So it is with this recent experience of mine that I think, "What are the treasures?" Are they abstract human attitudes and virtues such as those psychological qualities that Jesus tells us about in the Beatitudes, or can they be something more specific, yet ephemeral, such as a list pointing us to the path of our own identity?