 |
|
|
|
|
|
||
| . |
|
. |
O'Malley's Best So
Much Unfairness of Things Hi. My name's Bill, and I'm a workaholic. I'm also a recovering perfectionist. A classic A-type-male anal-retentive. The symptoms are vaguely embarrassing: I'm
hardly ever late, and if I am, I'm furious.
I'm never unprepared to teach, and I get every writing assignment back
the next class. I have my senior AP
English calendar plotted out day by day till mid-January, my religion classes
blocked out till November, and play rehearsals scheduled right through the
final performance. I almost always have
these homilies done by mid-week at the latest.
I'm ornery as a hornet over loose ends and petty thoughtlessness, like
people who hand in late papers, stack their dishes in the sink and walk away,
and leave the toilet roll empty. I'd
make Mr. Spock look like a ham-handed slacker.
And
that's just the positive, beneficial side of my neurosis! The flip-side is really off-putting, and you
can sum it up in one word: Resentment.
I work damn hard, and I confess I can get pretty apoplectic when people
dally and procrastinate and don't do their fair share. After teaching high school seniors for 43
years, you can't allow yourself to expect much gratitude or many tangible
rewards; if you did, you'd long since have quit to work in a napalm factory. But something persnickety in you
occasionally hankers for some superior to stop taking you for granted and say,
"Hey, I keep meaning to tell you-thanks." And perhaps the worst is resentment of the certifiable phonies
who bluff their way through, do the minimum, and get along by sucking up to the
bigwigs. I boil, snarl, hiss, and dream
of all kinds of excruciating and protracted tortures for them. When I
was in college, we once had a Greek exam coming up, so I glued myself to that
text for three days. Night before the
exam, my roommate, who'd gone to Regis and (he claimed) had read and understood
James Joyce's Ulysses as a high school sophomore, sauntered in from a night of
bar-hopping, and flipped through the pages.
"What's this crap?" says he, and plops stone-cold into
bed. When the papers came back, of course
he got an A and I got a C+. Ho, ho,
ho. In three years' philosophy and four
years' theology, I scrutinized the imponderables (in Latin) with all the
concentration of a Buddhist monk, dutifully, day after day, year after year,
but my grades were humiliating-while a great many of my friends breezed through
them as though summa cum laude were the minimum grade. There
are two related but separable resentments there. One is: I sincerely worked as hard as I could, and I got less
reward than others who didn't. The
other is: Other people are just too damned unfairly gifted. Which pretty much focuses today's parable, I
think. As for
the first resentment over the disparity between work and reward, I learned
something, scrabbling toward a semblance of sanity. I find that I'm a lot happier and less bitter when I make myself
consider the work itself as the reward, finding fulfillment just in being
useful. And of course when you factor
God into the equation instead of just some harried, insensitive superior, I
haven't a leg to stand on when I consider what I deserve for all the work I've
done. As you can imagine, I'm none too
keen on that other saying of Jesus that, after we've done our very best, we
ought to consider ourselves no more than unprofitable servants, doing what
we're supposed to do. But that is, in
fact, the truth. Now, when people ask
me how things are going, I answer with irritating regularity, "Probably
better than I deserve." Because I
didn't deserve to be born. I didn't
even exist; how could a non-existent deserve anything? After God's gift of existence, everything
else is gravy, even the crap. If
Cinderella moans about leaving the ball at midnight, the Fairy Godmother might
well say, "Honey, who the hell said you could to come to the ball at
all?" The
same, I think, is true of the second resentment over God's unfair distribution
of gifts: brains, looks, talent, family background. "Are you envious because I'm generous?" I suspect most of us spend far more time
looking enviously upward at the relatively few people above us on all those
false scales of personal worth, and almost no time at all looking down at the
overwhelming majority who would do anything for even some of the gifts we take
for granted. We keep forgetting-again
and again-we didn't merit an invitation to the ball. And yet we spend what little time we have before midnight griping
the accommodations, steaming over the people with better tables, better
dresses, funnier table companions. And
we never-not even for a watch-tick- consider how unspeakably generous God's
been to each of us, "called from the no of all nothing." One of
my few true living heroes is Oprah Winfrey.
Raised on a pig farm in Kosziusko, Mississippi, she worked her way up to
being one of the most enviable women in the world. And yet she's vowed to show her gratitude. "What we are trying to tackle in this
one hour," she says, "is the root of all the problems in the
world-lack of self-esteem. Don't
complain about what you don't have. Use
what you've got. Every single one of us
has the power of greatness, because greatness is determined by service." I can't
take tomorrow for granted when I did nothing to deserve today. Yesterday and tomorrow are
inaccessible. So today is the gift I've
been given. Let me milk it dry. |
|
Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
|