Following a Promotion

Those with whom I actually continued to be friends, following their promotion in this life, are few. Who will remain the same, following a promotion, other than he who truly believes that this world is impermanent? A theology professor used to relate that there are students who, after being ordained priests, when they visit the institute from which they graduated, make the priests who taught them feel that they have become their colleagues. Laughing, he recounts that “their ordination endows them, immediately, with the ability to strip off your priestly rank from you, when they address you. You become so-and-so, their friend so-and-so”! If I take this outside the Church, it expresses what I am telling you today. When placed in jobs considered lofty by people of this world, most people forget where they came from. I am not calling you to abandon friends who have been promoted in their careers in this world. What I am saying is that life is trivial if we do not uphold that we are friends!