With that in mind, Sunday’s Gospel from St. Luke was great timing. The passage ended with the words, “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.” Mammon is the biblical term for wealth or riches. The NBC poll of those in Gen Z indicates that wealth and riches clearly take priority over those things like “being spiritually grounded,” “being married” or “having children.”
For some years now, I’ve described the image of success as being that which had filled airplane magazines (before COVID-19). Success was presented as being able to travel to popular destinations, relax in luxurious hotels, go to exclusive shoppes, enjoy spas and massages, dine at high-end restaurants, check out the scene at trendy nightclubs, and attend professional sports events. In other words, success is about comfort and play. The “American Dream” is to aspire to the level of success that would allow a person to do all these things and brag about it.
I’ve also wondered what the messaging to young people has been by their parents, because parents don’t want their children to end up living with them in their basement. Parents, too, want their children to be successful. High school students are challenged by their parents to be in a myriad of school activities so they have a competitive edge in getting scholarships to a college or university with a good reputation. This, in turn, would make it more likely for them to get a position working for a prestigious company, so they can have a nice house in an exclusive neighborhood, enjoy a lifestyle of comfort and play, and continue the cycle of chasing after mammon!
From time to time when I meet with high school students in the hour before I celebrate their Confirmation, I ask them who in their lives have encouraged them to become saints. Their response is often a blank stare – like they have never had anyone talk about that – like they can’t process the question. Some even shake their heads from side to side. If to clarify I say, “Who in your life most encourages you to get to heaven, then some are able to name their grandmother, grandfather or a close relative. I believe successful parenting is not measured in terms of how much money your children make but how much their goodness inspires you!
So, what if we started measuring success in terms of goodness, virtue, integrity and service? What if we encouraged our children and young people to serve GOD and not MAMMON! What if we taught them to honor God with a passion and trust in the Lord so much so that they would allow him to amaze them in his loving providence? What if we held up to young people the life and example of contemporary saints and public figures who live to please the Lord and not to please themselves? The goal in life isn’t to make a name for ourselves but to honor Him whose name is above every other name.
As a consequence of me-centered living, it becomes more difficult to find people who are willing to engage in outreach and be active in the works of mercy. I think this is because service is counter cultural to the life of comfort and play. And the harsher daily life becomes, the more common is the tendency to take care of oneself, setting aside the concern for the needs of others. The more anxious our lives become, the less energy we have to respond to the needs of others, yet the very act of serving others is what would be a most natural remedy for our self-concern.
Instead, we all make so many plans! We have so much going on that we have little time for serving others. When COVID-19 shut everything down, I was hoping we might embrace a slower pace to life and not go back to the many, many things that make our lives so frenetic. However, being alone with our thoughts and feelings only seemed to increase our anxiety. Truly, using our many natural gifts and talents would help us overcome the fear of being unsuccessful.
Perhaps our greatest task is to model to those who come after us a life of goodness, integrity, virtue and service. Each of us has to check our own definition of what success is and if we are trying to serve two masters. Either we are “all in” for the Kingdom of God or we are placating the Lord on Sundays (at best) while we are chasing headlong after what the world says will make us happy. Gen Zer’s simply may be good students of what we have taught them!
