Wealth and pleasures are alien, not our own

But we take pleasure in being carried forward, and we rejoice at changing stages of life as if we were gaining something. We count it a blessing when a boy becomes a man, and a man becomes an old man. Yet we do not realize that each time we lose as much of life as we have lived, and we do not notice that our life is being spent. We are always measuring it by what has run past and flowed away, but we never stop to think that it is uncertain how much time the One who sent us out on this journey will choose to grant for the race, or when He will open the gates of entry for each of the runners. We do not consider that we must be ready every day for our departure from here, waiting with fixed eyes for the Master's signal. For He says, "Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, and be like people waiting for their master to return from the wedding feast, so that when he comes and knocks, they may open to him at once" (Luke 12:35-36).

Nor do we want to examine carefully which loads are light for such a race, able to move away together with those who gathered them and to make our life there joyful, becoming the true possessions of their owners; and which loads are heavy, burdensome, nailed to the earth, not made by nature to belong to human beings at all, and not permitted to follow their owners through that narrow gate. But the things we should have gathered, we have left behind; the things we ought to despise, those we gather. The things that can be united to us and truly become an ornament fitted to soul and body—to these we pay no attention. But the things that remain forever alien, imprinting on us only shame—these we try to heap up, laboring in vain and toiling at a toil like someone who deceives himself by choosing to draw water into a pierced jar.

For I think this is known even to all infants: none of the pleasant things in life, over which most people have gone mad, is truly ours or is made by nature to become ours. Rather, they appear equally alien to all—both to those who seem to enjoy them and to those who never come near them. Even if some people gather boundless gold in this life, it does not remain their own forever. Either it slips away while they are still living, pressing in on them from every side and flowing off to those who are stronger, or it abandons them when they have already come to death, refusing to depart together with those who acquired it.

Those who are dragged by the one who forcibly separates souls from this wretched flesh toward the necessary road keep turning back again and again to their possessions, weeping over the sweat they poured out for them from youth. But the wealth looks toward other hands, having smeared on its owners only the toil of gathering it and the charge of greed. Nor if someone acquires ten thousand acres of land, magnificent houses, herds of every kind of animal, and wraps himself in all power among men, does he enjoy them forever. He is called by their name for a little while, and then he will yield his prosperity to others again, going down under a small patch of earth himself. Often, even before the grave and before his departure from here, he will see his good fortune passing over to others—perhaps even to his enemies.