In reflecting upon the text Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you, it is said that the great Christian, Augustin Cochin, commented "Neglect to seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be taken from you as well."
The two quotations clarify each other.
In order to discover the truth of the second, I have only to look about in the world, the world of which our Savior speaks. How true it is! What it seeks in the first place is surely not the Kingdom of Heaven, the development of the supernatural life, the increase of divine riches in the soul; the rigorous consequences have followed - all other things are lacking as well.
How do persons who possess happiness spend their time? Throwing themselves into pleasures? No indeed. Those who run after pleasure remain perpetually thirsty, pursuing eternal mirages, powerless to escape suffering, mourning, sickness, and death; powerless to procure that without which they cannot live, the comforts of earth in an ever-increasing measure, the suppression of all pain or of all that causes pain and suffering.
They have cast aside the essential for the accidental, the eternal for the temporal. And so it happens that with the essential, they lose also the accidental; with the eternal, the temporal. Little does the one thing necessary matter to them; they seek to gorge themselves on the excess. And in the wake of the one thing necessary has followed, like a craft caught by cords to the rear of a boat, the hoped-for excess. It is as if a man had voluntarily caused a shipwreck and then sees slipping from under him the miserable raft whose support he had anticipated.
"O Lord, how much the wretchedness of the world lights up the wealth of my existence!"_________________
Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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