These readings press on something most psychological frameworks avoid: the moment when a person is asked to let go of what they love most, and to do so without the consolation of grief itself. This meditation explores that demand not as divine cruelty but as a precise instruction about what must happen in consciousness when a deeper level of life becomes possible. It draws on the esoteric tradition that Nicoll articulated, but moves into territory that belongs to no school — only to the experience of anyone who has stood at the edge of what they possess and felt the ground give way.
First reading
From the Book of Ezekiel — Ezekiel 24:15-24
The word of the LORD came to me:
Son of man, I am about to take from you the delight of your eyes by a sudden blow,
yet you must not mourn or weep or let any tears fall.
Groan only in silence; raise no lament for the dead.
Keep your turban bound upon your head and your sandals on your feet;
do not veil your face, and do not eat the bread of mourning.
I spoke to the people that morning,
and by evening my wife was dead;
and when the next day dawned I did as I had been commanded.
The people said to me, "Will you not tell us what these things mean for us,
that you act in this way?"
So I answered them: The word of the LORD came to me, saying,
Speak to the house of Israel: Thus says the Lord GOD:
I will desecrate my sanctuary—the stronghold of your pride,
the delight of your eyes, the longing of your hearts—
and the sons and daughters you left behind shall fall by the sword.
Then you shall do as I have done:
you shall not veil your faces nor eat the bread of mourning.
Your turbans shall stay upon your heads and your sandals upon your feet.
You shall neither mourn nor weep,
but you shall waste away in your iniquities and groan to one another.
So Ezekiel shall stand as a sign for you:
all that he has done, you also shall do when these things come to pass,
and you shall know that I am the Lord GOD.
Gospel
From the Gospel of Matthew — Matthew 19:16-22
A young man came forward and said to Jesus,
"Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?"
Jesus answered him, "Why do you question me about what is good?
One alone is good.
But if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments."
The young man asked, "Which ones?"
And Jesus said, "You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not give false testimony;
honor your father and your mother;
and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."
The young man replied, "All of these I have kept since my youth.
What do I still lack?"
Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect,
go and sell all that you possess and give it to the poor,
and you will store up treasure in heaven.
Then come, follow me."
But when the young man heard these words he turned away full of sorrow,
for his possessions were great.
— Interpretation —
The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings for today’s Mass place before us two scenes that appear utterly different — a prophet commanded not to mourn his dead wife, and a young man who turns away sorrowful because he cannot release his wealth. Yet both scenes concern the same thing. They concern what happens when a human being is brought to the threshold of a new level of being and discovers that the passage demands a sacrifice that touches the very center of the self.
Let us begin with Ezekiel, for his situation is the more terrible, and therefore the more illuminating.
God tells Ezekiel: I am about to take from you the delight of your eyes. And then the extraordinary command follows — you must not mourn. No tears. No lament. Keep your turban bound. Keep your sandals on. Do not eat the bread of mourning. His wife dies that evening, and the next morning he does as he was told.
Now, we must ask: what does this mean? If we take it only literally, we have a story of a God who is cruel beyond measure, demanding that a man suppress his natural grief for a symbolic purpose. But the language of Scripture, as we have so often seen, is not primarily about outer events. It is about states. And when we read that the delight of your eyes is taken away, we are reading about something that happens inwardly — the removal of what a man most identifies with, what he most loves, what he believes himself to be.
The delight of the eyes. This phrase deserves to be turned slowly. What delights the eyes? What do we gaze upon with that mixture of love and possession that constitutes our inner life? It is not only persons. It is our image of ourselves, our certainties, our spiritual achievements, our sense of being good, of being right, of having arrived somewhere. These are the delights of the eyes. And the command is: when these are taken from you, do not mourn.
This is not a command to be heartless. It is a command to remain conscious. Mourning, in the inner sense, is the collapse into identification — the self dissolving into its loss, becoming the loss, feeding on grief as a kind of dark nourishment. The bread of mourning is a real substance. It sustains a particular level of being: the level at which I am nothing without what I have lost. The command not to eat it is a command to remain upright in a new emptiness, to keep the turban bound — that is, to keep the mind ordered — and the sandals on — that is, to remain in contact with the ground of one’s actual existence.
Ezekiel is told he shall be a sign. And what is the sign? That it is possible to lose the delight of the eyes and not collapse. That consciousness can survive the removal of its most cherished object.
Now turn to the young man in Matthew’s Gospel. He comes to Christ with a real question. He has kept the commandments. He knows something is still missing. “What do I still lack?” This is not a casual question. It comes from a man who has reached the limit of what the first nature, the natural man, can achieve through obedience and effort.
And the answer Christ gives is devastating in its precision: sell all that you possess and give it to the poor, and you will store up treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
The young man turns away full of sorrow, for his possessions were great.
His possessions. What does a man possess inwardly? His opinions. His merits. His knowledge of himself as virtuous. His accumulated sense of having done the right things. The young man’s possessions are great precisely because he has kept every commandment. He is rich in self-righteousness — not in the crude, Pharisaic sense, but in the deeper sense that his identity is built on what he has done and what he has.
Christ does not condemn him. He simply shows him the door. And the door requires that you pass through it without luggage.
Notice that both Ezekiel and the young man face the same demand. Both are asked to stand in a place where everything that defined them has been removed — and to remain there. Ezekiel obeys. The young man cannot.
The difference is not moral. It is a difference of being. Ezekiel has reached a level where he can endure the emptiness without filling it with grief or self-pity. The young man has not yet reached that level. He is still the sum of his possessions.
And this is the question these readings put to each of us — not whether we are willing to sacrifice, for willingness is cheap, but whether we have been sufficiently emptied to stand in the place where nothing we love remains, and still not collapse. Whether we can keep the turban bound. Whether we can walk forward without the bread of mourning.
The Kingdom of Heaven is entered through such an emptiness. Not through accumulation. Not through merit. Through the astonishing discovery that when everything is taken, something remains that was never ours to begin with.
Photo by Hassan OUAJBIR on Unsplash
Scripture: Unified English Version — an original rendering synthesized from the King James and New American Bible translations
