In that most helpful little book by Fr Bede Jarrett, No Abiding City he gives us the key to what is meant by ‘Detachment‘. We are pilgrims in this world, travellers; ‘here we have no abiding city', and so we must ‘travel light', as the saying goes. There is a great temptation in the modern world to accumulate more and more things—they all seem necessary somehow, and the advertisements in any paper or periodical that we open try to persuade us that we must have this or that—and so perhaps we get it and then persuade ourselves that we cannot possibly do without it.

Or if we are not attached to ‘things', we may become attached to sitting in a special chair, a special way of doing things, a special seat in church. We can become attached to our comforts and our food. In religious life, we can become attached to some devotion, some particular way of singing the Mass, or to some ‘feelings’ we experience when taking Holy Communion or saying some prayer, and then one day the feelings are taken away and we realize that it was the ‘feelings’ to which we were attached and which were so important, and not Holy Communion or prayer.