In his ‘Final Testament’ to his brothers, St. Francis of Assisi taught that part of conversion involves ‘leaving the world.’ He said, ‘I tarried for a little while, and then I finally left the world.’ Most of us are still tarrying. We haven’t left the world, and we don’t want to. We’ve partly embraced our Christian vocation, but we really haven’t immersed ourselves in Jesus Christ. In fact, sometimes we belong more to the world than to the kingdom of God’¦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.
– Archbishop Charles Chaput
