WHAT MATTERS MOST

        I recently read about a priest, Fr. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit in the 1500s who, during the last 28 years of his life, worked as a missionary in China. Whenever he wrote a letter home to Italy, he knew it would take 7 years to get a reply.
        Given such circumstances, what else but the most essential could ever satisfy his need to share something of his life and times with his loved ones. What else but his deepest thoughts and feelings would ever justify the quill and the parchment, much less the journey his words would need to take to find their way home?
        While it is often noted, if not lamented, that we have more ways to share information than ever, but fewer ways to truly communicate, what a wonderful notion it is to consider what we might write about our life and times, and what we might want to express and share with our loved ones back home, knowing that it could well take three and half years for our words to reach their eyes.
       While we don’t live in the world of the 1500s, perhaps imagining we did from time to time could restore to our awareness what truly matters most to us, what we truly value and would want to share about ourselves, not to mention sort out to whom we would most want to send our love.
       Should we take a moment, if only in our thoughts, to muse about what we might write in such a letter, much of what seems so pressing may seem to pale while the vivid rays of our truth glow to life.   

Until next time...which will be much, much sooner than three and a half years --

With My Best,

Darryl