... And it was good

Today’s Gospel is centered around two themes. The first is wealth, poverty, and the relationship of these to faith. The second is the idea of faith itself. In the reading, a strong contrast is drawn between the life and afterlife of an unnamed rich man and the life and afterlife of Lazarus. I struggled with today’s reading for two specific reasons: The first is because I was born into a middle class family that could be described as neither rich nor poor by American standards. The second is because I have had a lifelong struggle with conceptualizing the afterlife.

What counts as rich? I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but the people in my life seem to define their experiences relative to the experiences of those around them. When I met my husband, he described himself to me as upper middle class. Honestly, I laughed out loud. He went to a nice private high school (Jesuit Dallas!), was attending an expensive university, and his parents had a large vacation home in an affluent part of coastal South Carolina. To keep my description brief, the vacation house was on a river and had an elevator. The thought that he could see himself as upper middle class, and not just wealthy, was literally unbelievable to me. When we talked about this disconnect, he told me that he never really saw himself as rich because he personally knew people who were obviously more wealthy than his family. So, in his mind, he was upper middle class.

After 11 years together I can now see why my husband described himself as upper middle class, and he can see why I laughed when he told me that’s how he sees himself. I can now also acknowledge that I, too, have always had more in common with the rich man than with Lazarus - even when my dad struggled to make money as a lumber salesman during the housing crisis of 2008. I have never wondered when my next meal would be. I have always had adequate clothing, adequate shelter, and adequate support from my loved ones. I have always had loved ones. And yet I haven’t always seen myself as rich, even though I obviously always have been.

I don’t like to acknowledge the fact that I have more in common with the rich man than with Lazarus because this acknowledgement confronts me with an uneasy question: If my life has more in common with the rich man than with Lazarus, will the same be true of my afterlife?

I think most of us could live with less. In AP Environmental Science, my students and I are constantly confronted with data about consumption patterns across the globe. Guess who is often #1 on our graphs? Depending on the product being analyzed, the USA is usually a top consumer of environmentally damaging commodities on a per capita basis. Essentially, on average, we live lives of excess. And who pays the ultimate price for this? The Lazaruses of the world (both domestically and abroad), who we often aren’t aware of or who we become uncomfortable when we do see them. The poor are more likely to suffer the consequences of environmental damage caused by the rich. Is this what God had in mind when He gave mankind dominion over His creation? Plastic pollution, degradation of ecosystems, extinction of biodiversity? I’m no theologian, but I doubt this was His intention.

How might your life have unintended consequences, positive or negative? How might you make small changes that could contribute to a larger wave of good in the world? What do you really need?

Author: Liz Bramlett Grindinger, Science Department