This story from Jesus today, taken from the Gospel of Mark, can help us understand Jesus’ teaching that the rich find it difficult to enter the kingdom of heaven while little children enter it quite naturally. We tend to misunderstand both why the rich find it hard to enter the kingdom and why little children enter it more easily. Children have no choice but to know their dependence. They’re not self-sufficient and know that they cannot provide for themselves. If someone doesn’t feed them, they go hungry. They need to say, and to say it often: “Help me!” It’s generally the opposite for adults, especially if we’re strong, talented, and blessed with sufficient wealth. We easily nurse the illusion of self-sufficiency. In our strength, we more naturally forget that we need others and are not self-reliant. It’s not riches that block us from entering the kingdom. Rather, it’s the danger that, by having them, we will more easily also have the illusion that we’re self-sufficient. We aren’t. The moral danger in being rich is instead the illusion of self-sufficiency that seems to forever accompany riches. Little children don’t suffer this illusion, but the strong do. As Thomas Aquinas points out in how he defines God (as Esse Subsistens – Self-sufficient Being), only God does not need anyone or anything else, but the rest of us do, and that’s the danger of being wealthy, money-wise or otherwise. How do we minimize that danger? Luke’s Gospel makes it clear that riches aren’t bad in themselves. God is rich. But God is prodigiously generous with that richness. God’s generosity, as we learn from the parables of Jesus, is so excessive that it’s scandalous. It upsets our measured sense of fairness. Generosity is Godlike, and hoarding is antithetical to heaven. From the time we learn to tie our own shoelaces until the various diminishments of life begin to strip away the illusion of self-sufficiency, riches of all kinds constitute a danger. We must never unlearn the words: “Help me!” [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s article, “Our Struggle with Riches”]