Reality Check
by Jake Frost in Faith on Monday, July 19, 2010 6:00 AM
My Dad and I were both working downtown and met for lunch one day. As we walked together a man stepped in front of us and asked for money.
I started to brush past him, but Dad stopped.
“I just got out of jail,” the man said. “And I’m trying to get a job. But no one will hire me like this.”
He was dirty, his clothes soiled, and he needed to shave and brush his teeth.
“But I’ve got a plan,” he continued. “If I can get enough money for a hotel room, I can shower, wash my clothes in the sink, and then I can get a job.”
Dad pulled out his wallet and gave him some bills.
“Thanks,” the man said. “God bless you.”
We continued on our way, and I told Dad I never gave money to people on the street.
“I generally don’t either” Dad said. “I don’t like to encourage panhandling. But not all situations are the same. Remember that everything you have, and everything you are, is a gift to you from God. Whether you choose to give is up to you.”
In the years since, I’ve often thought about that incident and stopped to remind myself that everything I have is given to me by God. As Jesus told the Twelve when commissioning them:
“Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”—Matthew 10:10
It’s a reality check. A mental recalibration for times I sense my reasoning getting a little dodgy, like when I find myself thinking things like “how can I be really sure how he’ll use the money?”
As a natural skinflint, I’m quite adept at deploying hypotheticals, theoreticals, and extrapolations of metaphysical possibilities projected into distant futurity to come up with reasons not to give. In Why I’m Not a Pacifist, C.S. Lewis called it the corrupting influence of our passions on our reasoning. It’s an occupational hazard of living: human beings have a tremendous capacity for convincing ourselves that whatever we want is really what’s right, after all.
Which is the deeper point embedded in my Dad’s observation. In living our faith, we have to use reason. As Scripture tells us:
“If you do good, know for whom you are doing it, and your kindness will have its effect. Do good to the just man and reward will be yours, if not from him, from the Lord. No good comes to him who gives comfort to the wicked, nor is it an act of mercy that he does. Give to the good man, refuse the sinner; refresh the downtrodden, give nothing to the proud man. No arms for combat should you give him, lest he use them against yourself; With twofold evil you will meet for every good deed you do for him.”— Sirach 12:1-6
The brain must be engaged. We find truth not just in a torrent of emotion, or our own subjective feelings, but through the cooperation of our heart and head working together, with prayer asking the Holy Spirit to guide the process.
And just as its easy to fall into the “skeptic septic”—the tendency of hyper-analysis for the ulterior purpose of riddling something with doubts to excuse us from doing what we really don’t want to do anyway—its also easy to wind up in the “no-see sewer” when we avert our eyes from real problems we would prefer not to notice so that we can go ahead with what we want to do.
Sometimes we just don’t want to see the man behind the curtain, even if Toto is pulling on his pant leg. Like when the boss tells us to do what we think is wrong, when we want to go along with friends, or join in what’s billed as a feel-good-cause when “everyone is doing it.”
We want to be congenial, to be included, to be on the inside. More than that, we want to avoid conflict and difficulty. No one wants to be the lone person called to stand against the crowd. We’d rather be part of the revelry.
But Scripture calls us to look, and see clearly; to know the good, and support it. And Scripture calls us to not do evil or support evil. So if we start to feel that niggling suspicion telling us our reasoning may be off-kilter, veering either toward the “skeptic septic” or the “no-see sewer” it’s time for a reality check.
Jesus gave us a good one when He told us to remember that “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 26: 34, 40
—Jake Frost is a lawyer, writer and stay-at-home Dade who lives near the Mississippi River with his wife and children. He comes from a large family in a small Midwest town and writes for Catholic pulbications around the country.
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