Attentive Humble Service Prevents Spiritual Blindness

If we spend our lives, for whatever reasons, only rarely doing the sort of humble yet significant everyday tasks in which we serve those with whom we live (e.g. washing dishes; laundry; grocery shopping; cooking, etc.), we risk becoming excessively self-enclosed creatures. Or, at least, we risk never going through the sort of spiritual enlargement of soul that such things work in us over time--that is, if we do such things with love, without bitterness, and while united to Christ.

I mention this in light of thinking about a particular spiritual danger faced by the wealthy. If you have enough financial wealth to afford hiring other people to clean and cook around your house, your day-to-day life can easily collapse in on itself in an encasement of solipsism. You are never (or rarely) forced to interrupt yourself from following your own whims for the sake of serving another person. You can go through the day serving mainly yourself.

Now, anyone can fall into this, and many of us do. But, I think it is a particular danger for those who are wealthy. The patterns we live for most of our lives fix themselves into grooves that are very hard to jump out of the older we get. If our life situation is such that we do not often, by the necessity of our daily activities, need to serve other people in humble ways, we should seek out regular opportunities to do this, such as volunteer and charitable work that involves simple personal service to others.

If we do not do this, and thus do not have regular times in our lives wherein we interrupt our interior fancies and reveries to reach beyond ourselves in humble, personal service to other human beings, we are likely to become blind to the real needs of others. We might become an elderly person who does not recognize the basic needs of a debilitated spouse.

Rendering ordinary, mundane, humble service to others--with love--increases our spiritual capacity to see other human persons before us as they truly are in the moment--to recognize their genuine needs as they are in the present, today. It is truly a terrible blindness to see a person in front of us and yet not be able to recognize their externally visible sufferings, not to see the basic needs which they lack. It is a great poverty not to be able to wash a floor for someone because we have blinded our ability to see such needs.

Selfishness and True Charity are Mutually Exclusive

Is it truly Christian to do a good thing for someone else because I am secretly looking forward to some sort of personal reward from God?

When Christians talk about performing a charitable service in the context of encouraging others to join them they often say, as an enticement, something like, "and you get back so much more than you give." While this may be true, I do not like how common this emphasis has become.

Sometimes such an exhortation primarily emphasizes the benefits to the charitable giver and the benefits to those in need only secondarily. The benefits to others are merely an afterthought. It's as though the person trying to encourage charitable behavior were saying, "If you want lots of spiritual benefits to come into your life, do good things for others. God likes this and will reward you for it. Oh, and by the way, other people benefit also."

This is not an appropriate attitude for anyone who genuinely seeks to imitate Jesus Christ. He did not seem to be the sort of person who said to Himself, "If I do this good thing for this person, yes he will benefit, but I will also get a big reward as well, so I think I'll do it." No. This sort of attitude is selfish and therefore far from the mind of Christ.

When we engage in doing something charitable for others, seeking benefits for ourselves should never be our primary motivation. The fact that we might experience personal spiritual fruits in the course of doing good deeds ought not be the foremost thing in our minds. If it is, our motivation for doing the good work is tainted. We have turned it into an act of selfishness.

When we do good things for others, we should not be thinking of ourselves. Rather, we should be thinking of the other person(s), and how much they, as a child of God, are worthy of our love and sacrifice. Our interior attitude as we perform charitable works should be other-centered, not self-centered. I should not care whether I will benefit when I do a good deed; I should care entirely about the others I am helping and how I can be of service to them.

In some Christian circles it is an all-too-common phenomenon to be mainly interested in the blessings we receive ourselves when we do good deeds for others. This is a perversion of the Christian faith, and is certainly not the example set for us by Christ. If we have to be enticed into loving others by the carrot of receiving a personal reward of whatever form, we have not even begun to comprehend what it means to imitate Christ. We should love because every human being is worthy of nothing less, no matter what happens to ourselves in the process, no matter the personal cost.

We Americans seem to be big on seeking rewards. But staying at this level, that of expecting a reward for everything we do, is ultimately childish. There comes a time when we must put childish things behind us, begin living more as adults and stop looking for rewards; and instead, seek to learn from Jesus how we might give more and more of ourselves away for the benefit of others.

The Scourge of Niceness

Have you ever been in a conversation where there are differing, even opposing, points of view, and then someone squashes the conversation by accusing the participating interlocutors of "attacking" each other and in so doing violating charity?

I would like to call this, "The Scourge of Niceness."

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of occassions when a disagreement among adults can become heated and the conversation most inappropriate--a violation of charity toward one's neighbor.

But, some people make the mistake of finding every firm disagreement--i.e., every argument--downright sinful. This is not so. This is a consequence of placing the value of maintaining an external appearance of niceness (meaning in this case never deliberately opposing the ideas of another) over and above the value of allegiance to the truth.

Any argument should be engaged with respect for the opposition. Shouting an opponent down, ad hominems, or other displays of disrespect should have no place among Christians. But to care enough about the truth to engage in an argument--if the setting permits this without violating prudence--shows a genuine form of love for your opponent, for yourself, and for Christ (who is The Truth).

The Scourge of Niceness is false charity. Provided we maintain personal control and keep respect for all involved, entering into an argument--making our points with firmness and vigor but without any malice--is a virtue highly important for the health of society. Who wants everyone going around avoiding every debate for the sake of keeping up (false) appearances? No, true charity actually demands--when prudence judges the time and place are right--that we have an obligation to seek out the truth with our fellow man. And at times this means having a good argument.

Not to contend together for the sake of truth out of a misplaced notion of niceness is to take too lightly the gift of human reason. It is a form of casual indifference to the great gift of the intellect which God has given us. Often this gift in order to see as far as possible into the truth of things must be exercised in the context of charitable yet vigorously-pursued argument. With grace, we can do this. Let us not be afraid. Down with the scourge of niceness!