Bishop to public: Keep your needs few, desires simple

DAGUPAN CITY ,Philippines  – Keep your desires simple and your needs few, said Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas in his meditation for the first Sunday of Lent today.

Villegas, in a letter sent to priests and others in consecrated life who may also use it as basis for their Lenten homilies, said the Lenten season “invites us to return to the desert and there wrestle with our number one enemy – ourselves.”

“Today the Lord shows us how he himself went into wilderness, wrestled with the devil and stood firm in the path of goodness,” he said.

Villegas said the desert reminds everyone of his defenselessness and vulnerabilities.

“In the desert, we can hold on to nothing and boast of nothing. In the desert, we choose to let go of everything if only to survive,” he said.

He said the desert experience teaches the Catholic faithful the three pillars of the spirituality of stewardship: contentment, generosity and humility.

“The nothingness of the desert leads us to the spirit of contentment. You want to be happy? Keep your desires simple and your needs few,” he said.

He said another teacher about contentment, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, said: “Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness and have few desires.”

“If you can be happy with nothing, you have found real happiness,” Villegas said.

This happy disposition must lead one to the second pillar of stewardship, which is generosity, he said.

“The greatest measure of love is to love without measure. It is not enough to give. We must give fearlessly and cheerfully. The real measure of generosity is not how much we give but how much we keep for ourselves,” he said.

He said the generous one is not the one who gives the most but the one who keeps the least.

He added that the third pillar of stewardship is humility, which St. Bernard described as the mother of salvation.

“We fell from the grace of God because of pride. We will be saved by cheerful giving, by humble sharing. Perhaps the best way to define humility is to echo the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: Humility means seeing ourselves the way God sees us. Humility is truth and pride is nothing but lying,” he said.