Inside You There Are Two Masters

There’s a billboard on my commute home that shows the current Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots. I notice as it gradually ticks upwards: 127 million, 140 million, 158 million. Occasionally it resets, abruptly becoming a paltry 40 million.

I do sometimes plunk down my $2 for a ticket, fantasizing about what I would do if I happened to get the numbers right. “I’d take the lump sum,” I think, “even though it’s always less that way, and of course it’s even less after taxes.” My brother used to complain about this last fact - after the government gets its teeth in you, that $300 million is maybe only $200 million, and surely the $200 million return on a $2 ticket is terribly disappointing.

My first plan is always pretty boring: let’s pay off my debts! Next, maybe a vacation? If I feel generous, maybe endow a scholarship or name a building at my alma mater?

But more recently, that fantasy led me to look up “French chateaus for sale.” Who wouldn’t want an 18th century mansion with a dozen rooms, painted mural ceilings, and extra space to house the servants? I saw one that had a beautifully appointed private chapel, and this quickly became one of my dealbreakers on French chateaus (“No chapel? No sale.”).

Obviously I know it isn’t going to happen. But it’s nice to fantasize about sometimes.

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Years ago, I was in a small faith sharing group at my parish in Chicago, and we volunteered to take care of providing dinner at a homeless shelter one night. We had spent months as a group getting to know one another, breaking open scripture together, praying together. Now we went to Costco together to get the food, spent the evening bonding in the kitchen, and then had the joy of serving those who were staying the night. But then we stayed in the kitchen, eating together but apart from those we were there for. Serving those in need sounded like a great idea, but sharing with them proved to be a bit too discomforting.

A dozen or more years later, I find myself invited to join a six week study session on Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. It was organized by a group that is looking to start a house of hospitality and Catholic Worker community here in Tampa, and is the fourth time they’ve run one of these study sessions in the last year.

A few weeks before our first meeting, I had tea with a couple of the leaders, who asked me why I was interested in joining up. I explained that the first time I tried to read The Long Loneliness, I got bored fairly early on and put it aside. I came back a few years later and pushed myself through it, finding it richer than my previous experience had prepared me for. Now I found the opportunity to read it with others, which seemed like the next step. I told them that I was a theologian, I taught about Dorothy Day in my class on the ethics of war and peace, and that I had friends who were involved in the Dorothy Day Guild that were working on her canonization.

But also part of it too is that I am occasionally reminded of my faith sharing group from Chicago all those years ago, and my own reticence to follow through on what my religious beliefs tell me to do. Over our cups of tea, I told them that I believe Jesus wants me to love the poor, but the truth is I don’t really know any poor people.

I mean, surely among my neighborhood, my parish, and my students, I have some acquaintances who are poor, although I can’t truthfully say so with any certainty or confidence. I know some of my friends now were poor growing up, before I knew them, but they’ve moved up (to the east side, as they say). Now we all have comfortable, middle to upper middle class existences, and we do, stereotypically, chat about our mortgages and retirement plans.

Rereading Day’s The Long Loneliness, I keenly feel the challenge to expand my limited personal horizon, which has largely kept me in a gated community of affection. I have, in ways intentional and inertial, walled myself off from many Jesus calls me to love. Day writes that

Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities—all these things marked us as the privileged in a way. We felt a respect for the poor and destitute as those nearest to God, as those chosen by Christ for His compassion. (Long Loneliness, 204)

I do feel the guilt and the responsibility, but am only slowly making progress in doing anything with that. The pricks of conscience from rereading this book, and reading it with others struck by the same challenge, will (I hope) push me beyond reading and writing about the call of the gospel and towards actually doing it.

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There is one critique of my French chateau dreams which is that it is unrealistic: I’m unlikely to ever have the sort of wealth that makes owning an estate an actuality. But there’s another critique: I shouldn’t have the sort of wealth that makes owning an estate an actuality.

Reflecting on this internal dilemma, I was reminded of the old saying that became a meme, “inside you there are two wolves,” and the one that wins is the one you feed the most. And I saw my two wolves as (1) the desire for wealth, comfort, grandeur, and (2) the desire to live a life befitting the gospel. And I reckoned that, in the interim, I had settled for being a sheep, or better yet a goat, somewhere in the middle: a comfortable, never quite secure, middle class life among peers in the same kinds of pens.

But then my wife reminded me of a more fitting image for what I’ve been thinking through:

No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24)