An artist asked the gallery owner if there had been any interest in his paintings on display at that time. "I have good news and bad news," the owner replied. "The good news is that a gentleman inquired about your work and wondered if it would appreciate in value after your death. When I told him it would, he bought all 15 of your paintings."
"That's wonderful," the artist exclaimed. "What's the bad news?"
"The guy was your doctor."
An important concept of Stewardship is that we are co-creators with God. What we do in this world, our work, should give us self esteem. Teilhard de Chardin thought that 90 percent of practising Christians of his time looked upon their work as "spiritual encumbrance" which took them away from God. How sad.
At age 70, Michelangelo wrote to his nephew Leonardo and said, "Many believe, as I believe, that I was designated by God to do the work that I do. Even now in my old age, I cannot stop doing this work because I love what I do and I am called by God to do it."
When he was carving or sculpting a new piece of work, Michelangelo protested when somebody would say, "How do you carve and etch that out of that blank rock?" He would retort, "It is not I who carves something new. All I do is set free what the Lord has inside the rock."
The Stewardship prayer I alluded to in my last article talks of our talents: "May I use these gifts to build your kingdom". You and I have the opportunity to do this by offering our works, activities and our very lives to the Lord daily and on Sunday mornings when we gather as a community to worship.
Too often we live our daily lives without a thought to the wonderful gifts with which the creator has surrounded us. The joys and pleasures of life indeed tend to distract us from their source. It is only when we are brought to our knees by the trials of life that we learn gratitude.
With gratitude comes humility. Fr. Brendan McGuire speaks about the great ideas that sometimes just pop into out heads. "Where did that come from? We know that it did not come from us." he says. "It came out of nowhere but nobody else knows that and we are tempted to say, 'Yeah, yeah. It was my idea.'"
We need to realize that we are just instruments of God; very important instruments, each and every one of us destined like Michelangelo for great work. "We have a role to play and our role is to point the way to Christ in all we say and all we do and to take no credit but to give it to Christ," McGuire says.
Our talents are the special blessings each of us receives from a loving Creator. May we use our talents generously, and with God be the success!
