How many tears to build mansions? (Chrysostom)

The gold bit on your horse, the gold circlet on the wrist of your slave, the gilding on your shoes, mean that you are robbing the orphan and starving the widow. When you have passed away, each passer-by who looks upon your great mansion will say, "How many tears did it take to build that mansion? how many orphans were stripped? how many widows wronged? how many laborers deprived of their honest wages?" Even death itself will not deliver you from your accusers.

...
How think you that you obey Christ's commandments, when you spend your time collecting interest, piling up loans, buying slaves like livestock, and merging business with business? And that is not all. Upon all this you heap injustice, taking possession of lands and houses, and multiplying poverty and hunger.

John Chrysostom

Some hard words spoken by an ancient preacher on possessions. While our timeframe has changed and the specifics may be different, I find it amazing how much of this remains applicable to the American church of the 21st century. 

Common food, common inheritance (Ambrose)

God ordered all things to be produced so that there would be common food for all, and so that the earth would be the common inheritance of all. Thus, nature has produced a common right, but greed has made it the right of a few. 

It is better to preserve for the Lord souls rather than gold. He who sent the apostles without gold also gathered the churches without gold. The church has gold, not to store it, but to give it up, to use it for those who are in need. It is better to keep the living vessels, than the golden ones.

Ambrose of Milan

Chronological Parochialism (Dreher)

Had I encountered the classics as a student, I imagine that I would have grasped the relativism of our own worldview. I mean, I would have been a lot more questioning and skeptical of the worldview we receive from the supposedly wise men and women of our own time and place. We suffer from what I call chronological parochialism -- that is, the idea that we, being modern, know better than everybody who came before us. If the past is an undiscovered country, our modern prejudices tell us that we don't have anything to learn from the people who live there. But Homer knew the human heart better than most contemporaries, and Dante knew the human soul more penetratingly than many of us do.

Words of Wisdom: Rod Dreher on Reading The Odyssey for the First Time.  CiRCE Institute http://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/words-wisdom-rod-dreher-reading-odyssey-first-time

My good friend, Eric Nelson, introduced me many months ago to the writing and insightful commentary of Rod Dreher.  My wife introduced me to the valuable resources from CiRCE a couple years ago, and especially after attending the CiRCE conference last summer.  Put these two influences together, and there is a powerful synergy!