Seek Ye First...

Fr. Walter Ciszek

"How easy it is, in times of ease, for us to become dependent on our routines, on the established order of our day-to-day existence, to carry us along. We begin to take things for granted, to rely on ourselves and our own resources, to settle in to this world and look to it for our support. We all too easily come to equate being comfortable with a sense of well-being, to seek our comforts solely in the sense of being comfortable. Friends and possessions around us, one day is followed by the next, good health and happiness for the most part of our hours. We don't have to desire much of the things of this world – to be enamored of riches, for example, or greedy or avaricious – in order to have gained this sense of comfort and well-being, to trust in them as our support and to take God for granted. It is the status quo that we rely on, that carries us from day-to-day, and somehow we begin to lose sight of the fact that under all these things and behind all these things, it is God who supports and sustains us. We go along, taking for granted that tomorrow will very much be like today, comfortable in the world we have created for ourselves, secure in the established order we have learned to live with, however imperfect it may be, and give little thought to God at all.

"Somehow then, God must contrive to break through those routines of hours and remind us once again...that we are ultimately dependent only upon him, that he has made us and destined us for life with him through all eternity, that the things of this world and this world itself are not our lasting city, that his we are and that we must look to him and turn to him and everything. Then it is, perhaps, that he must allow our whole world to be turned upside down in order to remind us it is not our permanent abode or final destiny, to bring us to our senses and restore our sense of values, to turn our thoughts once more to him – even if at first our thoughts are questioning and full of reproaches. Then it is that he must remind us again, with terrible clarity, that he meant exactly what he said in those seemingly simple words of the Sermon on the Mount: 'Do not be anxious about what you shall eat, or what you shall wear, or where you shall sleep, but seek first the kingdom of God and God's justice'."

He Leadeth Me, page 20