Last year I was teaching C.S. Lewis's Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, to a class of sixth graders at a classical school in Texas, on the fading border between metropolis and endless farmland. In the book, Reepicheep, a chivalric mouse, is on a perilous quest toward Aslan's country, the land rumored to be found after sailing east over the edge of the world. For many of my students, his pursuit of this quest seemed fateful and foolish. After all, Reepicheep had a good life and good friends. Why sacrifice all of it?
Today's Gospel invites us — quite starkly — to distinguish the good from the summum bonum: the highest good, our God. Though it may seem, at first glance, that our Lord is quite flippant about lopping off limbs, his message actually dignifies the body and glorifies God. Christ's audience knows the significant value of a hand, a foot, and an eye. However, this value is transcended by the promises of the kingdom of heaven.
If we are, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts it, "spiritual beings having a human experience," we should see ourselves as noble vessels journeying towards heaven. With this in mind, we ought not forget that a ship's proper end is not self-preservation, but rather to reach a destination. It is better to arrive in a battered boat than to remain whole but adrift, lost at sea.
The Gospel warns us that those who focus on temporal goods and lose sight of the eternal will "be thrown into Gehenna, where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'" This last line, an echo of Isaiah 66, reminds us that we have two choices. We can offer up our bodies as living sacrifices, willing to lose our lives to gain everything; or we can hold too tightly to our concupiscent flesh, only to find that it is a poor, corruptible substitute for the Beatific Vision.
So let us be like Reepicheep, sacrificing many goods for the sake of what is greater, letting his boat be carried by the current, toward the divine and lurid sun, shining upon impossibly green mountains — not sad to have sailed beyond the edge of the world he'd known, but "quivering with happiness" as he vanished into the one he'd hoped for.
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