Beloved:Come now, you who say,
“Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town,
spend a year there doing business, and make a profit”–
you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow.
You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.
James
4:13-14
This
is one of those remarkable passages that is unmistakably parallel to the teachings of the Buddha (or St. Josaphat as he's known in Christianity). Other
passages, like Luke 12:27-28 (and Matthew 6:28) have the same message, but we
tend to focus on the apparent promise of divine intervention: “Consider the
lilies, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin; yet I tell you,
even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if
this is how God clothes the grass in the field, which today exists, and
tomorrow is cast into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of
little faith?” God does not promise to magically intervene to dress
us. But faith does invite us to keep
things in perspective. In the context of
the sacred and the eternal, the anxieties of today vanish.
