Luceat!

Kelly M. raised an excellent point in a comment on my last post,

Could you or someone else offer some thoughts on how to balance the fact that we are supposed to be “in this world” and ambassadors for Christ in the modern culture, while maintaining the perspective of being “not of the world.”

There is a darkness in the hearts and minds of the people of this country - my own included - that comes from the pursuit of the American Dream. It says that suffering is an evil to be eliminated by the attainment of material goods and prosperity. It says that we can work hard enough, long enough, and well enough to attain enough things to make us truly happy. It asks us to give up our strength, intellect, and time in pursuit of the things of this world. It says nothing about God and His infinite goodness and generosity who doesn’t measure our productivity, only our love.

“Well, I like my nice things! My parents worked really hard to give them to me, and I’m not going to have 20 kids and lose all that.”

Former co-worker - angry at me for suggesting that having nice things is pointless

Here’s the answer to Kelly’s question:

“Hey Dad,” I said when I was 9 or so. “Why do we live here? All the houses are falling apart, and people say it’s dangerous. Is it because we’re poor?”

“No, Paul. It’s because it’s all we need. Your mother and I are going to live here for the rest of our lives. Jesus lives right across the street in the Church. Your school is there too. And look, you have a bigger back yard than any big house on the ‘nice’ side of town. Our neighbors are good people, and it’s not their fault the landlords won’t pay to have the houses repainted or repaired.

We could have two cars, a big house, and a boat. We could go out to eat at restaurants and buy steaks every night. But to get those things, we’d have to put ourselves in debt, and we’d have to stop having kids. I wouldn’t have been able to quit working when my bosses told me to lie and cheat people. I think I’d rather be free and surrounded by people who love me than a slave to my things and surrounded by people who love the stuff I have.”

I love that neighborhood. Freedom and love live there in its lack of uniformity, its poverty, its soul. I loved hearing the black mothers screaming across the street for their kids to come home for dinner, and the hispanic mothers always screaming at their kids. I miss the pecans, Japanese persimmons, and Vietnamese kumquat trees that the neighborhood kids would pillage in the spring. They’d always ask my mom first of course, “Miss Sylvia, can we get some of that fruit off y’all’s trees?” I miss the creole cowboys who rode their horses down the street before returning them to their backyard paddocks. I miss the smell of fried everything and sweet, sweet tea.

On summer evenings, I’d sit in the yard, talk to my dad, and watch the nighthawks dive-bomb the plentiful bugs in the air. During the protracted southeast Texas warm season we call “fall”, my friends, brothers, and I would all walk down to the abandoned lot to play tackle football till we were too bruised to go on.

The family never went to Disney world or Six Flags. We never went skiing, nor did we travel out of state much. Instead we’d drive down to the beach and roll around in the warm Gulf surf. We’d learn about the different fish and birds while we made fires and roasted marshmallows. Mom always made sandwiches that tasted ten times better at the beach, as everything inevitably does. After faithfully asking St. Andrew to have Jesus send enough fish for supper, we’d go home and eat. Baked flounder, fried red fish, seared speckled sea trout, bar-b-cued crabs, and boiled shrimp were my favorites.

Quite often, we’d have the good Monsignor, some of my dad’s friends from work, the neighbors, or the Mormon missionaries over to eat with us, and my dad would regale us with funny tales from his lusty youth. Then we’d always talk about the state of the Church or politics and lively debates would go on. Sometimes we’d just watch a good movie, the news, Discovery channel, or EWTN together in the living room. We weren’t surviving, we were thriving, and wealthier than 98.5% of the world’s population.

My father convinced me that our needs are much smaller than we think they are and that happiness doesn’t ever hinge on fulfilling our desires for what the world offers. I think we’d have been happy with a mud hut and a bunch of sticks to play with. I think we would have played with sticks more often if Mom hadn’t stopped us so we wouldn’t kill each other.

The Cost of Choice
There is a built-in cost to every decision we make. It’s called an opportunity cost. You nearly always give up one good for the sake of another when you decide to invest your resources (time, talent, capital). You can learn quite a bit about about your own character by noting the opportunities you give up and those you choose instead.

For instance, let’s say I have an extra $100 laying around, and I choose to spend it on an item of clothing that I don’t need instead of investing it wisely for my children or giving it away in charity. I have just made an investment in something temporary, the value of which I will soon forget and the utility of which is nil. The pleasure I gained from it will be entirely gone after the threads wear out, and the friends who once admired it will have forgotten it even sooner. In this case, I’ve necessarily made the conscious choice to take for myself with little or no real gain at the very real cost of my own true good or even someone else’s good.

A month over two years ago, when hurricane Rita followed hurricane Katrina into Texas and Louisiana, there was a man who would come into my office every day at the Catholic Student Center at Lamar University. He was one of those guys who sometimes made some poor choices in life, but was generally loved by everyone. One day, as he was sitting in my office, a lady came walking by my door looking pretty dejected.

He said, “Hey, is everything alright?”

She stopped and almost started to cry. She was a single mother, a straight-for-years cocaine addict, and trying to work through college and support her kids. She just said haltingly, “I can’t pay my electric bill this month.”

He didn’t hesitate; he just asked, “how much is it?”

She said, “Sixty-five…”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, grabbed four $20s and said, “Look, my uncle just paid me $80 to help him clear all the knocked over trees out from my grandma’s back yard this weekend. I felt bad taking it, but I just figured out why God wanted me to have it. It’s for you, and there’s a little bit for groceries too.”

He had $80 of opportunity, and he chose a greater good over a lesser good. I believe that woman almost kissed him. After she left, crying good tears, this man sat in my office and sobbed. He talked about selfishness, he talked about the temptation he had to keep that $80, he talked about so many times in his life where he didn’t do the right thing or hesitated for just a moment and let the opportunity pass him by. In the end, he just said, “Thank you, Jesus for making me a real man right then.”

Could I do my job as a missionary with less?

I’d like to say too many things about this subject, but I’ll just do it with another story.

My grandfather, Fletcher Richardson, Esq., was a professional lawyer and county judge in Hardin County, Texas. He raised my mother, aunts, and uncles in a simple pier-and-beam, wood-framed house built in 1904 surrounded by the 90 ft. yellow pines of East Texas. He never wore a watch, nor did he keep a clock in his courtroom. He took naps in his office every day. He spent little to nothing on clothing. He would often leave the house, and when the kids asked where he was going, he’d just say, “Gotta go see a man about a dog.”

When my Grandpa Jim and Grandma Paulette O’Brien met Grandpa Fletcher and Grandma Minnieola at their simple house, my Grandma ‘Lette said to my father in private, “Jimmy, I thought you said he was a lawyer!”

“He is Mom. He’s actually a county judge,” my dad replied.

“But Jimmy, he doesn’t have any teeth!”

“Oh, he does Mom, there’re two in the back. You just can’t see them.”

My jet setting, executive vice president, golf-playing, world-traveling, agnostic grandparents were in a little bit of shock.

However, it was Fletcher Richardson with his two teeth whose family was invited to spend time with Lyndon B. and Lady Bird Johnson at their ranch every year, not Jim O’Brien with his Italian leather shoes and houses in Florida and the Adirondacks. And it was Fletcher Richardson who when he passed away had a few hundred people attend his funeral to remember him, not Jim O’Brien.

That’s when my mother found out where her dad had gone when he was, “going to see a man about a dog.” Person after person told my family how Fletcher had come to them in private when times were rough and fed their families or gave them legal help pro bono. And my father’s favorite memory from that funeral was when a judge from a neighboring metropolitan county came up to my mother and said, “Sylvia, your father was the only public official I’ve ever met who left office poorer than he was when he went in.”

“What are the real possibilities of man? And of what man are we speaking? Man dominated by concupiscence, or man redeemed by Christ?”

Pope John Paul II - The Theology of the Body

It isn’t our conformity to the standards of the world that will make us appealing as missionaries; it will always and everywhere be our conformity to Christ.

So be in the world, but not of the world, and do it boldly.