Saint Pope John Paul II writes that the question which the rich young man puts to Jesus of Nazareth is one which rises from the depths of his heart. “It is an essential and unavoidable question for every person’s life, for it is about the moral good which must be done and about eternal life.” All are called to spiritual detachment from the things of this world. But Jesus invites this young man to consider something better still, to embrace a means of perfection that entails dispossessing himself of monetary assets. It is not that poverty is romanticized or idealized for its own sake but that surrendering worldly wealth frees the heart to find its true treasure in heaven. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that God wants from us “not a million acts of virtue, but a million acts of surrender, culminating in one massive surrender of soul, mind, and body.” In “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis has a fantasy of some (ten) interviews between someone in heaven trying to coax someone not there to come to heaven. Each of the ten persons seeking entrance into heaven is blocked by some significant flaw, pride, anger, idolatry, the incapacity to forgive, shame, lust, and the like. In each case, irrespective of the flaw, the person in heaven keeps telling the other: “All you have to do is to give me your hand and let me lead you there. All you have to do is surrender!” I continue to learn that age brings us physically to our knees, and more and more, everything we have so painstakingly built up in our life begins to mean less and less. But that, as Fr. Rolheiser would say, “is the order of things.” Salvation is not about great achievements but about a great embrace. C.S. Lewis succinctly captured the point, “All we have to do is surrender.”