33 Sunday Ordinary Time, 13 November 2011, Matthew 25:14-30

euro

I remember learning how to cycle a bike – we had stabilisers on for many months – my cousins arrived from Limerick, and one of my older cousins advised me to take off the stabilisers and learn to cycle without them – it was great until I tried to stop and I didn't put my feet down!

Discovering our talents in life is a bit like learning to cycle a bike – you never forget how to do it

The parable of the talents is a fascinating image for the Kingdom of God – it is one that we can all connect with – the primacy of the economic in our national consciousness at the moment is incredible, and unhealthy – the primacy of the economic is forcing us to make decisions at a national level that are not good – we could almost argue that we have talked ourselves into a corner where the only value in life is the economic value – our sovereignty as people has perhaps been eroded by the presence of the troika (EU, IMF, ECB) – but it is the sovereignty of our thinking that has been eroded by the constant barrage of economic analysis

At least this primary viewpoint of the economic allows us access to the parable – a talent was an ancient measure of monetary value – of money – to put it into perspective, one talent was equal to 6,000 days of labour – if you do the maths, one talent is equal to 500,000 eur – on the minimum wage, a person could earn about 1 million eur in a lifetime – this is roughly equal to two talents of money

So, the parable is about money – but not just that, it is a parable about what we do with our money – and, remembering that it is a parable, money is a way of talking about all of our gifts and talents, not just our money – we have more gifts and talents than money – indeed we could argue from an extreme perspective that we don't need money at all to survive – money is a means to an end – it is there to serve the needs of people, not the other way around – our attitude to money has to be re-formed – and this is not the first time; in very recent history, just after World War II, the whole concept of money changed, even though many people did not know it – we could re-imagine and re-form the international financial system to serve the needs of people rather than the needs of the system itself – it is possible, but may be unrealistic to hope for.

There is a much more pressing implication of the gospel for us – and that is in forming our own attitude to money – I met an asylum seeker in Dublin in 2004 – at that time he was receiving 27 eur each week, plus his living accommodation and food – He was sharing a bedroom in a house with three others – each week they kept 7 eur and the four of them put the other 20 eur into a shared fund – every week one of them received the pot – that way they were able to save enough to buy a pair of shoes or a mobile phone – our perception of how much money we have is very important – our perception is formed by our time and place – how much our neighbour earns – how much a top civil servant earns – even how much the President earns – the UN standard of a dollar a day formed the asylum seekers view of money – he could live on 1 eur/day

The choices we make with the money we have, pay off – we reap what we sow – spend unwisely and live poorly – spend wisely and live well – a housekeeper that I had used to volunteer to teach young mothers how to prepare food from scratch – living on social welfare, and with little training, they were kept poor not simply by the relatively small amount of money they received, but rather that they were spending it on convenience foods because they did not know how to prepare fresh food – teaching people how to prepare fresh food is a core way of helping the poor to a better way of life – rather than paying for convenience foods, they can prepare fresh, highly nutritious meals, with very little money.



Poverty is a reality in our world, in contemporary Ireland – changing poverty has much to do with changing our perception of money – we need help to think in ways that are different to the primary thoughts and views of our world – the primacy of the economic as the only value of worth, leads us to accept, uncritically, the decisions made by government and by those who are in power – the example of the closure of various embassies last week by the government because there was no economic gain from them is a hugely distorted view of the world.

East Timor

To give an example, the embassy in Timor Leste was closed along with the Irish embassies to Iran and to the Vatican. The reason given, which we have uncritically accepted, is that these particular missions are of no economic value to us – however, we did not set up our mission in Timor Leste, aka "East Timor", to gain economically – we set it up because of the massive humanitarian crisis that overtook East Timor in 1999 – It was always to benefit East Timor economically that we set up a diplomatic mission there – not that we would benefit, except of course by our interaction with another wonderfully diverse nation, culture and society.

Embassy of Ireland to the Holy See

We are undoubtedly richer for our relationship with East Timor – I propose that we are just as enriched by our diplomatic relations with other states, including the Vatican, no matter what the naysayers say.

The economic is the only value in our society – it is distorting our vision, and clouding our minds – only we can change that fact ourselves by choosing what we think and informing ourselves of other, richer perspectives.