Successful Musings

In America it is not hard to find community leaders, politicians, preachers and teachers who talk about or give any number of speeches on the American dream as the land of opportunity and that anyone can be successful if you are willing to work hard. In America, we believe in fairness at the starting line, but once the starting pistol roars, indicating the start of the race, the rules change because we are a nation that believe that the winner takes all. Only in America do we reward so generously the winner and punish so severely the losers.  In America we define success in black and white – you can win or you can lose. In America success is deserved and failure is also deserved. In the Medieval times there were two categories of people in this society – the fortunate and the unfortunate. The fortunate were often defined by privilege, family titles, military prowess, or royalty. Everyone else – the serfs, the peasants, or the slaves were the unfortunate. As society moved away from the family farms and into the cities, they became laborers and worked long hours for low wages and were still losers – unfortunates. 

In an age when our identity is inextricably bound with our chosen vocation and how well we do something, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety in living in today’s world, especially in the United States. There was a time when our identity was not bound to our jobs or chosen vocation. How often don’t we get asked the question, “what do you do?” If we are engineers or lawyers, we don’t hesitate to let people know how successful we are. How many times haven’t I heard people respond to the question, “what do you do?” with eyes cast down and the simply say, “I’m 'just' an electrician or a plumber” How many garbage men and women are quick to brag about their job or the delivery person, proudly proclaims, I deliver things. Probably not too many. Why? Because in America these aren’t vocations that successful people pursue.  Some sociologist might call this division of vocation, “job snobbery”. 

 "We are living in a time when our character is not dependent upon who we are, but by what we do."

This has not always been the case. The question, ‘what do you do?’ is a modern question – a question that could only come to a society and culture where higher education and further training were accessible to the ordinary person. Three hundred years ago, what you did didn’t matter because what did matter was where you came from and who is your family? What tribe are you a part or what village to hail from? These were the questions of identity. Success depended upon the reputation of your family and the tribe to which you belonged. In today’s society, what is printed on our business card and what is deep inside of our very being are not always consistent one with the other. We are living in a time when our character is not dependent upon who we are, but by what we do. There is a profound sadness in the world and there are a lot of people who are longing for respect, dignity, and to be understood. By rewarding the successful and snubbing the losers, we are creating a culture that is not a land of freedom, opportunity, and liberty, but a caste society of the privileged and the successful and the losers and the unfortunates. 

As a Christian, I cannot say that I am comfortable with this.  The burning question for me is what should be the response of our religious communities to something as offensive to our Creator God as the American notion of “winners take all” and “losers” deserve what they get? Is this the world God had in mind when in a dramatic and powerful way, Creator God separated the light from the darkness, the water from the land, and breathed living breath into the beauty that surrounds us? In my judgment, the scriptures, especially the Christian scriptures, I am reminded that for all intents a purpose, Jesus was by no means successful by the standards of the modern world. Jesus was crucified among criminals. What could be more ‘unfortunate’ than this? As I see it, the success for Jesus was and continues to be an invitation to live one’s life free of the fear of failing. Even as Jesus hung, dying, on the cross he did not see himself or his ministry as a failure. The world may have seen it this way, but Jesus did not. In the seventies, a time when our young people and the media were flirting with secular humanism, there was a poster that read and I still remember it, “God doesn’t make junk.” When God breathed life into our very being, God did not see a loser and neither did he see one people more privileged than another. All were equal. In God’s world, there are no fortunate or unfortunates, there are only people who are loved equally by God. In God’s world, we know the successful people by the ones who, like Jesus, are known by how well they have loved.