For Now…

For Now, Hide Your Treasure

You have found a treasure: the treasure of God’s love. You know now where it is, but you are not yet ready to own it fully. So many attachments keep pulling you away. If you would fully own your treasure, you must hide it in the field where you found it, go off happily to sell everything you own, and then come back and buy the field. You can be truly happy that you have found the treasure. But you should not be so naive as to think that you already own it. Only when you have let go of everything else can the treasure be completely yours. Having found the treasure puts you on a new quest for it. The spiritual life is a long and often arduous search for what you have already found. You can only seek God when you have already found God. The desire for God’s unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love. Because finding the treasure is only the beginning of the search, you have to be careful. If you expose the treasure to others without fully owning it, you might harm yourself and even lose the treasure. A newfound love needs to be nurtured in a quiet, intimate space. Overexposure kills it. That is why you must hide the treasure and spend your energy in selling your property so that you can buy the field where you have hidden it. This is often a painful enterprise, because your sense of who you are is so intimately connected to all the things you own: success, friends, prestige, money, degrees, and so on. But you know that nothing but the treasure itself can truly satisfy you. Finding the treasure without being ready yet to fully own it will make you restless. This is the restlessness of the search for God. It is the way to holiness. It is the road to the kingdom. It is the journey to the place where you can rest.

Henri J. M. Nouwen The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom