Back in the summer — it already seems like a hundred years ago — my teenager went to one of those college programs which promise the motivated high-school student an entire liberal-arts education distilled to a two-week elixir. She had a great time and came back talking about Flannery O’Connor, which I’d been trying to get her to do for, oh, ever or so.
One night over dinner with her twenty-six new best friends, the talk turned to the subject of what everyone wanted to be when he or she grew up. The girls, one by one, announced that they wanted to be lawyers. One girl said she wanted to go into politics, maybe. A few other girls thought they’d like to do some corporate kind of job.
At last my daughter’s turn came. “Well,” she said, “I want to be a mom.”
There was a silence. Finally someone asked, “Then why are you here?”
“Because I think the basic unit of society ought to be educated,” my daughter said.
*
When people ask what you want to do, unless they’re your parents or, say, your wife and the mother of your children, to whom you’ve just proposed your plan to ditch your job and get a Ph.d, they’re not really asking you to explain your strategy for not winding up under the viaduct with lawnmower parts and a plastic Ninja-Turtles wading pool tied to your purloined Dollar Tree shopping cart. Or maybe they are. These days that’s an eminently reasonable question. But I think what people really want to know, although they may not know that they want to know this, is what you think education is and why you value it. Why are you bothering to pay all this money and do all this reading and lose all this sleep? What do you hope to get out of it, at the far end, which will have made what you put into it worthwhile? What kind of life, what kind of finished and polished and actualized self, is worth this level of investment?
Of course, you never know. Maybe you’ll wind up with a polished, actualized, employed self, in the field of your starry career dreams, but then again, maybe you won’t. My husband, for example, got a Ph.d and then went to work for a time as a very highly-educated security guard. When he started the Ph.d, people asked him what he planned to do — it was a Ph.d in theology, so that was a fair enough question — and his answer was never, “What I really want to do is guard a warehouse full of digital televisions for twelve hours every day.” When it transpired that guarding digital televisions was what he was going to do, I don’t think he said to himself, “Well, there’s a lifetime of education down the drain.” He just took a lot of books with him to work. Ten thousand digital televisions not plugged in are very quiet company, giving a person plenty of time to think.
We’ve already learned, on the rollercoaster of the housing market, to rethink the way in which we value our homes, not as investment, but as where we live. It’s an exercise in reigning in our imaginations, which want to go dashing forward into the future where, so we thought, we’d have built up enough equity to buy a small nation-state and spend the rest of our lives playing Parcheesi in utter contentment, which was why we bought this house and not that one in the first place. Now, as it turns out, we might as well get out the Parcheesi board and be thankful that what our educations prepared us for — we hope — was to know how to make contentment, even happiness, out of what we have at hand. Which is never easy at the best of times; the good thing about a downturn is that it makes us practice more.
*
Meanwhile, Betty Duffy has been thinking about mothers and daughters. Also, on a related note, the daughter of friends here has given up an appointment at the Air Force Academy after a year as a cadet to be a postulant with the Nashville Dominicans. You never know what future the now is shaping . . . I’m still remembering her radiant face, the last time I saw her at Mass. If you’re so inclined, please remember Sister Nora and her intentions in your prayers.
My 21 year old daughter hates when people ask her ‘What will you do” with her education. She’ll have, at the end of this year God Willing, a major in history and a minor in theology, providing she manages that pesky Wheelock’s Latin and the 20 page thesis.
She sometimes tells people, “I don’t know what I”m going to ‘do with it’. God hasn’t told me yet.” Like me, she wants to be a stay at home mom.
I’m going to recommend that she read this post. I have a feeling she’ll have a new answer for that question.
Well, is the question –
What do you want to do?
or is it
What do you want to be?
A lot of people think that they are the same question. They are not. Too many people think that we are what we do. Sometimes the two coincide, but not always.
One deals merely with courses of action, the other deals with matters of one’s fundamental essence.
St. Therese did not do a whole lot, as she herself attests. She simply was (and still is) something great.
So long as you are the person you were meant to be, that is, the person that God made you to be, rather than the conceit of thinking that we are self-actualizing, then what you do is no longer a concern. You will do what is in your nature to do.
And what is it that you were meant to be, what kind of person did God make you to be, what is He calling you to “be”? THAT is the question one should be asking. The “do” will follow from that.
Yes, I think you’re exactly right, Bender. And I think it’s a mistake to conflate work with vocation.
Beautiful thoughts. Thank you. It is a distinction that is echoed in the past week’s readings about “Knowing your place.” (last first, first last) which is not the same as being oppressed. It’s about being able to recognize how one’s vocation is broader and deeper than the craziest greatest ambitions we might ever harbor, and that holding that vocation may be the hardest best thing we ever do, but it is also the only thing God calls us to be.
And Shana, Godspeed to your daughter as she approaches graduation. Mine is a high-schooled senior who wants to major in either classics or English, so I’m sure she’ll get a lot of “What are you going to do with that,” too.
I did two ultimately abortive rounds of graduate school, pursuing but never attaining an M.F.A. in poetry writing (a long story for another time). Once during one of these episodes, I went to a party at the house of an old high-school friend, and her father asked me what I was doing with myself. I said I was going to school to write poetry. He said, “Well, I’d never let my girls do that.”
I’m not sure whether poetry-writing seemed not like a plausible escape-the-viaduct-with-shopping-cart scenario (how to make money writing poetry: marry somebody with a job), or whether it just seemed kind of disreputable, or what. Probably the latter. And the real answer to what I was doing, though I would never have admitted it at the time, was that being married already, I was killing time until I had a baby. As my friend Betty Duffy notes — and she’s about ten years younger than I am, but it was already starting to be true for my wave of young women — this really was not a kosher answer.
I want to write more about this whole education/vocation thing, especially as it pertains to girls and women, though it’s hard to do without falling into obvious and extreme positions on either side of the feminism divide.
Kudos to your daughter for having the fortitude to respond with a true answer! I will admit that sometimes I still get ruffled when people dismiss me when I say that I am now what I always hoped I would be: a mom. Period. That had been my dream from the time I was young and I feel blessed that God has granted me that. It’s a shame that people don’t see that as a valuable use of time anymore.
PS: I am college educated, and the first in my family to graduate from college. I felt a lot of pressure to “make something” of myself. My father and mother, God bless them, never tried to stop me from marrying my husband a week after graduation, and then proceeding directly to children with no career stops along the way. They just smiled and told me that education never goes to waste.
I hope that by the time my daughter gets through twelve years of home education she has answers like that for those types of questions. Talk about “not a kosher answer”–I graduated college about ten years ago and when, after spending a couple years dancing the “I think I’ll get a Ph.D or go to law school” dance, I met the man I wanted to marry and ‘fessed up to my advisors it was pretty ugly. I hope my children are benefiting somewhat, at least, from that wasted brain they warned me about.
Sally, your daughter has it exactly right. Being a mother is the highest vocation if you ask me; being an educated mother only makes sense.
I wonder if the question is not so much “why are you putting all this effort into an education that you don’t intend to use,” but, “why do you want to be “just a mom?”
My daughters all want to be moms, but in self-defense they need to be educated so they can support themselves and any children they have, should it come to that. So far, I have one that’s an English major working as a technical writer (good writers can always get a job!), another is an elementary ed. teacher, and the third has just started college with the goal of being a nurse. All three jobs lend themselves to motherhood quite well.
The confusion of doing and being results from the rampant denial of original sin and rejection of the concept of grace, i.e., Pelagianism, that is shot through American culture. It is closely connected with the Arianism that dominates our upper echelons: “Jesus was a great prophet perhaps, but not god, not he.” Pelagianism has Jesus as a role model, but not an organic source of a new sort of life without which we cannot attain eternal life and joy and peace.
So in our Pelagian world, Jesus cannot save us and will not save, and we must save ourselves. In our Pelagian world that is becoming acutely aware of its own brokenness, the drive to “save the planet” (good grief) is accelerating to breakneck pace. We must all get public-service jobs or feel guilty. We must all pay more and more taxes. We must all be involved in a million organizations and clubs in our towns and churches or else we are not “contributing.” We must be willing to bring work home with us or work on the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day. We must all make our children do fifteen afterschool activities because, aside from being unable to afford extended daycare, we are made to worry that they will be “maladjusted” if we just let them play and do their homework. And we must all, all of us, RECYCLE EVERYTHING – the kosher concern of this new cult of eco-geo-salvation. If we fail in any of these aspects, we are not good.
But if we take a breath, recline a little, look at the clear blue sky and the sun and the trees, lift our hearts to our Maker, and let Him remind us that these things are the cathedral that God has built to honor His beloved, adopted children, that we are His sons and daughters, the living stones of His Temple and that we are GOOD, and that He will give us all that we need… then we remember that we are humans who are, regardless of what we do, beings in the image and likeness of the Lord of the Universe.
The Lords of the World certainly hate such a thing and labor to enslave us to their temporal profit, and lie to make the labor tolerated, even if intolerable.
In such a spiritual conflict, a mother – a being whose purpose is, in love, to procreate more beings who love, who are good, who are made for God and not for slavery – is the most vile and subversive of foes. Only if she can be induced to raise her children for her own profit (emotional gratification, etc.), into slavery, will she be tolerated. But a woman who wants to sacrifice for her family will always be, under heaven, the most hated enemy of our enemy.
All the more reason to give our moms hugs!
There is something to be said for acquiring an employable skill, or maybe a few of them. I went to nursing school after getting a degree in history. In retrospect, I might have done better to get the nursing degree first, then study what I wanted knowing I could always find a job or work part-time.
What’s destructive is the old script that it’s not enough to build a decent solid life, but that one must be a Big Success, and that the alternative is becoming a Big Failure. There are a lot of options out there for young women, and maybe we ought to start thinking in terms of making a living, plus.
Being an educated mother is important, but so is being an educated mother with an employable skill set.
I think that with the divorce rate being between 35-50% (depending on how you calculate the figures) people expect young women to come out of college with marketable skills.
That said, I wish your daughter the best of luck. She certainly seems like she could be successful in whatever she plans to do (be it ‘just’ raising our future).
I agree with the marketable skills idea, especially if said education involves going into debt. If my kids really wanted something like a theology or poetry degree, that’s fine, but the reality is they’ll be poor and in debt. If that’s the trade-off they want to make, welcome to adulthood.
And girls have to choose mates wisely; if she marries with college debt and no marketable skills, the additional burden of loan payback falls on her husband’s shoulders. (And yes, I hope he went to law or engineering school!)
And don’t discount the idea of self-education; if the classics and theology and a real liberal arts education is what you want, along with motherhood, you can do that on your own.
Again, I think we’re on the cusp of a paradigm shift. My late grandmother was a nurse, and so is my aunt and a whole passle of cousins, all of them because they knew it was something in whch a woman could always find work, full or part-time, and because they could work while being trained. A large percentage of women went into nursing having seen their own mothers at a loss regarding going back to work out of necessity.
Again, I wish I could have foreseen how downright envious I would be, me with my history BA, of people who had a trade already, and weren’t burdened with the necessity of an all-or-nothing, total commitment profession, or years and years of grad school with little relevance to employment.
And being married and having a family is NOT just something that happens of its own accord, as we were led, or led ourselves to believe. That als needs to be taken into account from the beginning, and that doesn’t mean “settling” for a second-class or vicarious life.
Yes, the marketable-skill thing is on the money. I was afraid of going on too long for a blog post, but that’s a talk we have a lot, and it’s not that she doesn’t have ideas in that direction. She’s already done some teaching — she taught a Latin class to younger homeschooled kids last year — which she likes and is good at, so that’s one option to pursue. She also has interest in being a midwife.
Betty Duffy and I were batting all this back and forth at that post I linked to, and one thing which came to me in the course of that conversation is that you have to think carefully about what your organizing principle is going to be.
For most of the other girls on this program — the kind of good, smart, motivated girls who would spend two weeks on a liberal-arts-immersion program — the organizing principle seemed to be the idea of work. Most of them already had jobs, spent a lot of their time reading classifieds in search of better jobs (tired of Taco Loco? try the pet store. Tired of the pet store? There’s an opportunity for you at Taco Loco. etc), and would say, at sixteen and seventeen, that they could not imagine their lives without work. It wasn’t that they enjoyed what they were doing; it wasn’t necessarily that it even mattered what they were doing, except that eventually they wanted to be doing something more “real.” But, as my daughter observed, they seemed to need the stimulation of work: out of the house, with other people, in a place where something exciting could potentially be happening. And she felt that this was driving their entire vision for the future.
These vocational questions are high-stakes for girls in a certain kind of way, because female biology is involved, and how do you factor that in? Do you contracept it into submission and get on with things? Do you see yourself as actively choosing something other than marriage and motherhood? I don’t think many girls do see themselves as making that deliberate choice, but they may in effect be doing it to themselves by thinking that that will be an app they can add later if it comes on the market for them.
I know, too, that the question of college debt is a serious one for young men considering marriage. We had a former student of my husband’s living with us last summer (the husband’s not still a security guard, by the way; one real advantage of having a college professor in the family is that a) we do have a tuition-free option should other funding for other colleges not come through; and b) there’s such a thing as a college tuition-exchange network, which makes things frankly easier for my kids. I know that’s not the case universally); anyway, this houseguest of ours was saying that he was not such a romantic as to be swept away by a girl with an $80, 000 debt load.
So maybe these questions do come down to the issue of what is going to be the center around which you organize your life. It’s not so much an either/or question as a “what do you really want, and how are you going to be sure you don’t foreclose on that possibility?” question.
I think.
My grandmother was a nurse, along with an aunt and a whole passle of cousins. They went into it because they knew it was a field in which a woman could always find work, and they had experience with limited options. Also, they knew they could work in the profession as they trained, so it was a good form of higher education for a girl (or boy) of limited resources.
I came along in an age in which we believed our possibilities to be limitless, and in which we believed that marriage and family would just happen of their own accord, and if they didn’t, a career of one’s own was far more respectful than what we considered to be living vicariously. Big mistake, that, and I’m grateful to G-d that He opened my eyes to the possibility of other options at an opportune time.
But we’re on the cusp of a major paradigm change, I think, at least among young women who don’t want to miss their chance at a family.
Americans in many circles seem to think that 2 kids is a “large family”. Traditional (not necessarily Orthodox) Israelis don’t faint at 5 or 6, and many with fewer are actually envious. Middle Easterners in general like the idea of being “blessed with children”. I feel sorry for you folks having to deal with the gasps and astonishment; we had to visit relatives in America to get that.
For sure, it’s a balancing act, but it’s a lot harder to get across the high wire if you assume you might find yourself up there one day than if you just bought ringside seats.
Re: College debt
This is something that can be gotten around, more or less, if one does an awful lot of reasearch before finding a university. Sometimes the answer is right down the street.
We are very blessed to live a few miles from Franciscan University of Steubenville. They have a wonderful service to the local community; any high schooler aged 16 or older, who has at least a C average and the written permission of their high school (which in my kids’ cases would be me) that they can apply to attend any 100 or 200 course to take a seat that a freshman didn’t fill for $100 plus the cost of books. They may take two a semester, including the summer semester.
If they choose to attend FUS after graduation, they can apply all of those courses as BOTH high school and college. My eldest did her entire freshman year for $1000 cash (plus books) that way, going even through the summer semester. Had she chosen to go elsewhere, the majority of those credits would likely only have applied to high school – but to get such an outstanding Catholic education in so many subjects for one year’s tuition at a local Catholic high school still was worth it to us.
Commuters who have never attended another university (after high school graduation) also can apply for a half priced tution scholarship, which is another gift to the local community.
My hs. senior son is in his second year of taking classes, and my 16 year old daughter is now taking her first history course there. He wants to major in computer information and she wants to be a writer, so I have my lists of the courses necessary not only to be accepted (like US history or English Lit) but the ones they’ll need to graduate FUS. Sometimes it is a two birds, one rather cheap stone year.
The oldest girl has a good job on campus that permits her to work through the holidays and summers too, and earned enough in the last two years so she did not have to take a loan after the scholarship & Pell grant was applied. Her siblings who are high school students can apply for holiday and summer jobs there, and once full timers, work on campus until they graduate as their sister is doing.
We also learned that the university has a greatly reduced rate for those who want to go to night school there, applying those same night rates for those few courses that must be taken during the day. It very well may be that after my son and his next-down sister graduates high school, that working days and going to school nights will be the way they go. One never knows how the wind will blow with grants, scholarships and loans and whatnot.
Not every university will give so much, but while FUS isn’t cheap by any stretch, there are ways to get an education there without having to be so deeply in debt after, although an awful lot of the students who go there do come out with deep debt. That is why it is important to do a lot of investigating before applying anywhere. I don’t know why it is a sin to take years off to work and save (only that for some reason our culture seems to think it is) if one wants to go to a particular and expensive Uni rather than jumping right in out of high school. There are many roads that head to the same destination, but if one is very clever about it, it doesn’t have to make paupers out of everyone getting there.
There have to be other universities that do that for the local community elsewhere.
And don’t discount the idea of self-education
A “formal” education is one of the biggest scams that has been foisted on people.
The truth is — most everything that you learn is self-taught, including what you learn at a university. And once you are out of the university and are working, it is an on-going process of self-teaching and self-learning to know the things you know for your job. That is certainly the case for lawyers — a substantial part of the job is researching the law, i.e. learning it, even if you have been practicing for 20 years. And the only way to learn it is to sit yourself down and open a book or two. Ain’t no one going to spoon-feed it to you.
No, one does not go to college to actually learn something, truth be told. He or she pays gazillions of dollars to go to college to get that piece of paper, that degree which employers demand and thus is the key that opens the door to a career. Learning? You can do that on your own.
But is a fancy career, a high-paying job, prestige — which generally require that piece of paper — are these what is most important in life?
What is the true meaning of success?
What is the true meaning of success?
That’s purely subjective, don’t you think?
I believe myself to be wildly successful because I’ve birthed and raised 7 children. Three of them have hit adulthood relatively unscathed, and I’ve got a marketable profession to fall back on in case I need to work.
While I agree that we are for the most part self-taught, because of the way things are and have been for the last several years, college is necessary to, first, learn the jargon of your chosen career so you can communicate, and next, as Bender said, “get that piece of paper,” without which you are dead in the water. And it’s just because of this ridiculous notion that everyone needs to go to college, promoted of course, by the colleges and universities.
Those ‘prestige’ jobs? Most of them are not worth one whit, and when the bad times come, they’ll be gone. And when the bad times do come, the people who can feed and clothe and protect their families with their own wit and skill will be the successful ones.
Yes?
A university education is more than just learning the curriculum for each course and then regurgitating it during exam week, though.
Believe me, as a parent who put five kids through private school from pre-K through university, and who is now picking up the tab for two graduate degrees, I agree that a college education can be a great huge waste of money and time. That’s why we stressed the importance of getting your (ha! our) money’s worth out of it to our kids.
A college education, however, can be so much more than just obtaining an overpriced certificate of employability. Students stumble across subjects they might never have otherwise, they are exposed to career possibilities they didn’t know existed. They are forging friendships and making connections that may last a lifetime.
Also, there is a huge difference between graduating in the top 10% of your class from a top tier university and getting a barely-passing GPA from a lesser institution, and employers recognize that. I’m impressed by young adults who can go away to college and balance academics, athletics, social lives and a commitment to their faith. That means something to an employer.
There’s a lot wrong with American university life, and with costs and such, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We consider educating our children an investment in their future — their education is their inheritance (’cause there ain’t much left).
Better to invest in them now than to let it all sit in a bank and then have a huge chunk of it go to the government when we die.
Those ‘prestige’ jobs? Most of them are not worth one whit, and when the bad times come, they’ll be gone. And when the bad times do come, the people who can feed and clothe and protect their families with their own wit and skill will be the successful ones.
Yes?
Well, no…
They’re worth quite a bit, actually, especially if you live a modest lifestyle and save and invest wisely.
Not all of them will be gone when the bad times come — although I don’t know anyone who hasn’t experienced a layoff at one or more points in their career. It’s what you do with those unexpected change-ups that counts, and often the connections and in-roads you’re going to need to segue from a layoff into a new job come from the connections you made during your university years. Sometimes the intangible skills you pick up during university are the ones that stand you in good stead during those times. And, if you are wise with your money, the high salary you earned before the layoff will keep you afloat until you can find another job a lot longer than if you had been living hand-to-mouth previously.
I don’t think any of us should be dreaming of a life of subsistance-level drudgery for our children.
I don’t think any of us should be dreaming of a life of subsistance-level drudgery for our children.
True, but neither should we be dreaming of a life of super-rich drudgery for them either.
What is the true meaning of success? (Hint: it has nothing to do with money, or material things, or having power.)
Perhaps we have a different idea of what a ‘prestige’ job is.
Again, that’s a subjective thing.
I’m married to a critical care physician. I guess some people might think that’s a prestigious job, but it really isn’t. Sure, the money is good but the hours are truly horrendous and the sacrifices that both he and his family make don’t always seem worth it.
In general, I think a good definition of a prestigious job is one where high incomes are made without having produced anything. An example – the hospital CEO – they make enormous loads of money – more than a lot physicians. The best I can say for them is that they take a nice photo and give a good pep talk, while their secretaries and subordinates do the work.
How about professional sports figures? Those are pretty prestigious – again, they earn money that is unimaginable to most of us while producing nothing. You can say that entertainment is a ‘product’ I guess, but in the end, you can’t eat it or wear it or take shelter in it.
In deference to my dear friend, I won’t say anything about (some) attorneys
Pro sports figures are a whole n’other ball game, pun intended, lol! Obviously a lot of parents and a lot of kids have all kinds of dreams about that, but those dreams will only become a reality for a miniscule number of them.
I think CEO-types get short changed. They do more work than most people realize, and it’s work that often takes them away from their families for a long time. They create jobs, create wealth that a lot of those subordinates and underlings rely on, so let’s not play that all wealthy CEOs with big bonuses are bad, evil, soulless people and all the underlings are good and holy and virtuous game. That’s just stupid, and anyone who wants to work for a social collective or a commune or whatever is free to do so, but I can assure you it won’t end well.
I’ve dealt with corporate secretaries plenty, and they all think they’re irreplacable. Guess what? They’re not. They think they do all the work because they hit the send button on the fax machine and the print button on the printer, but they didn’t sit in the back rooms arm twisting senators into forking over 4 billion dollars in government contracts. The CEO did, and it ain’t easy, and he has a lot on his shoulders — the lives of lots of men and women and their families, actually.
But this isn’t about my job can kick your job’s ass, is it?
Success — true success — has nothing to do with education or jobs per se. True success has to do with discerning God’s will and sucking it up and doing it.
But that doesn’t mean we shrug off education and creating opportunities for meaningful work.
Universities are not vocational schools (although the lesser ones have pushed that angle lately, unfortunately). They are an opportunity for young adults to discover and dialogue, to grow intellectually, personally and even spiritually. They’re an opportunity for young adults to fail, even, in a relatively safe environment and learn from their failures. Even if a graduated student never holds a job in her life, she will surely benefit her whole life from the experience. Necessary for her personal survival? No. But not to be shrugged off as useless, either.
We should be dreaming of futures full of faith, family and fulfilling work for our children. We should be dreaming of futures in which they are afforded opportunities to use their gifts and talents to the fullest. Money has very little to do with it, but being financially secure doesn’t suck.
I think SMcG is right about the value of a college education. While it’s true that you can, and do, learn many things on your own, there’s something about exposure to even one really good college professor that is life-changing. I corresponded with a couple of mine for years after I graduated.
My daughter came home from her summer thing — at the University of Dallas, incidentally, in case anyone’s interested; highly, highly recommended — raving about the lectures she’d gone to and the professors she had met and heard. The friends were fun, but the intellectual stuff, the very idea that all that is out there waiting for her, was hugely exciting to her.
I’ve often joked that my educational goal, as a homeschooler, was to raise autodidacts who can do their own laundry. This same child spent the evening at the dining-room table plowing her way through chemistry — you have to appreciate just what a mathy-sciency family we are not, as a general rule — which she is more or less teaching to herself, by her own choice, working away and reading the text over and over until she gets the answers right, doing all the experiments in the kitchen and writing them up. When she’s determined to conquer something, that’s what she does. I could say, “Go study a liberal-arts core curriculum on your own,” and she could do it.
But the time will come, and it will be here soon, when she needs to go and make those friends and have those conversations away from the dining-room table, to succeed and fail and think about things. It will be time to grow up, in other words, and a well-chosen college is a good place to do that. (That’s why we sent her to this program, anyway . . . ).
Thanks, by the way, for the very good discussion. I threw all that out there with no real answers in my mind, hoping you thoughtful people would take it up. Keep it coming.
Those ‘prestige’ jobs? Most of them are not worth one whit
No, they are not. They are worth as much as a castle made of sand. The “prestige” will be worth nothing when it ends in dust.
True prestige, true success has nothing to do with socio-economic matters. There are plenty of guys in heaven who pushed brooms down here on earth. And perhaps plenty of guys in hell who were world leaders and pop superstars.
The most prestiguous guy ever bent over and washed the dirty smelly feet of the other guys who were with Him.
Being lowly is no automatic guarantee that one is a saint, but better to struggle paycheck-to-paycheck, depending on Providence as do the lilies of the field, and be a good and decent person, than to be President of a powerful nation and be a jerk. The former is a resounding success, the latter is an utter failure.
Sally, my youngest daughter is the mathy-sciencey one among us, so I do indeed appreciate the dedication and focus your daughter must have exhibited to advance herself in the sciences — and that a library card and bus pass can only get you so far in any field requiring a math/science background. Do any of us really want to drive over a bridge built by a self-taught engineer, or rely on a self-taught surgeon for treatment?
Bender, “prestige” is in the eye of the beholder. Just because someone perceives a job they don’t understand as flashy, non-productive and over-paid doesn’t mean it is any of those things. Most of the people who have a false notion about any job would be disavowed of that notion after having to do it for a day.
For all any of us know — and speculating on the final resting place of anyone else’s soul is a fool’s game, as well as probably sinful — there are as many menial laborers in hell as there are lawyers, and as many investment bankers in heaven as there are stay-at-home moms.
That all these earthly things will one day be dust does not mean we’re to sit around like lumps, scratching out a hand-to-mouth existence, waiting for the second coming. God gave each of us specific gifts for a reason. We’re meant to use them — we’re meant to use them to the greater glory of God, of course, but we’re definitely meant to use them and not throw our hands up and figure we shouldn’t try just because we’ll all be dust one day, so why bother.
Bender, “prestige” is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, the world has one eye, and God has another. And He repeatedly told us that the most exaulted is the one who is humble.
I really do not know why you are so contentious on this. No one, and certainly not me, said to just sit around like lumps or to not use whatever gifts we have. We are each different parts of the body.
We each have a different role to play, and whatever role we play we should do with charity and excellence. But we should not denigrate those who are a little toe, or call such role “sitting around like lumps.”
And we should not think that simply because someone is sitting at the head of the table that he is worthy of the spot. Neither should we aspire to take that first seat at the table, else someone come along and put us in the last place.
Really, why are you so argumentative and contentious on this? Humility is NOT a bad thing, and aspirations to pride are not a virtue.
NO, we should NOT aspire to, or want our children to, simply have some high-paying job or live in some McMansion or have a cool car or have a hot wife — we should not judge success as the world does — rather, we should aspire and endeavor to simply be one who not only does, but lives charity in truth. That is the only measure of success.
There are rich jerks and there are poor jerks. There are virtuous poor and their are virtuous rich people. But the Lord Himself cautioned against the ability of the rich to be so virtuous — they are all too often to enamoured of worldly things. The rich can be virtuous, like Joseph of Arimethea, but as a practical matter, as He warned, it is difficult.
The message here — and one that really should not cause such strife — is that charity and truth are the only things to aspire to — socio-economic status is irrelevant.
The greatest gift that God gave us to use is not our lawyerly analytical skills or ability to handle a scalpel or a great singing voice or anything else that the world treasures. The greatest gift that He gave us is the capacity for love. If you do not have love, you have nothing.
Bender, I already acknowledged that position and money are not the goal, and that true success has to do with one’s desire to do God’s will and acting on that desire — several posts ago, actually.
I really don’t think I’m the one being contentious here. I just don’t like the implication that anyone who has achieved any measure of earthly “success” (as in they’re not poor and uneducated) is somehow less capable of desiring to do God’s will and acting accordingly.
I also don’t like the implication that university education is worthless, pointless, useless, bad, etc., that you and your wife are putting out there.
That all sounds like sour grapes more than anything else, and a reverse snobbery that’s pretty unattractive.
It’s also really weird coming from a doctor. Didn’t you go to university and medical school? Why would you deny the same path to another, or is it just women you don’t think should be pursuing advanced education? I don’t get it.
Yes, charity and truth are the only things to aspire to, regardless of one’s gifts, talents, career, level of education, and so forth. Where did I say it wasn’t?
SMcG – I’m not sure how the discussion got to this point, but I need to clarify some things.
First – your rude and condescending attitude regarding secretaries is really nauseating, and your implication that I merely have a “perception” about corporate executives is insulting. You have no clue what my knowledge of and level of interaction with corporate executives is!
Neither Bender nor I contend that earthly success is bad – we never said that. We never so much as intimated that successful people were not desirous of doing the will of God. Bender is a professional; I have a nursing degree. We are both devout Catholics who actively serve our parishes.
My success comes from my vocation as a wife and mother. Bender has his own personal measures of success. He’ll have to tell you what they are, if he wants to.
I agree with you that a university education is NOT worthless, pointless, bad, etc. in general. My particular point of view is that we have been sold and then spoon-fed a huge bill of goods in this country that if you aren’t college educated you’re done for. The consequence of that is there are so many people who don’t have the mentation for college being sucked in with programs and grants and scholarships that cover just enough expense that the parents think they are getting a great deal and then willingly shell out a bunch out-of-pocket only to see Junior drop out half way through his first year, someone who might have done very well going to trade school or something like that. In addition, I don’t know where you live, but where I’m from the first year of college is simply an extension of high school with numerous remediation classes.
Bender and I are on the same page in most things, and while we have had conversations in myriad subjects over the course of our friendship, college education has never come up. I’m not surprised we hold a relatively similar position, though.
He’s a wonderful teacher and friend to me, very intelligent, and I ‘cheer’ for him, but he’s not my ball and chain.
That’s all.
No, my comment regarding corporate admins was in response to your rude and condescending comments about executives, comments which reveal a lack of knowledge of what many high-level corporate execs do. Also, what I said was general and allowed for innocent misunderstanding and misconception. Take it easy with the accusations.
Both Bender and you did indeed come across as being somewhat anti-higher-education and anti-corporate-America, actually. Maybe you don’t think you did, but, uh, yeah, you did. Take a breath, say a Hail Mary, and read through your words again. They were rather pointed and not very nice.
My success comes as my vocation as a wife and mother as well. I guess the difference between you and me is that I don’t disrespect my husband by aligning myself so closely with another man on the internet to the point where I publicly name myself his cheerleader or refer to him as a ball and chain, even jokingly. One of the greatest, if not THE greatest, gifts in my life, is my husband and our marriage and our family. That’s something we both honor and cherish in everything we do — it is who we are. We don’t diminish it by bashing each other behind our backs or getting cozy with members of the opposite sex, even it it’s only on the internet.
If you want to back pedal now and claim you were really all about promoting a renaissance of the American manufacturing industry, fine, but that’s not really what you said or what your tone implied, and it’s all still there for anyone to read.
I don’t know where you live, either, or what kinds of schools your children are capable of getting into, but the universities my children attended were most certainly not an extension of high school. If schools suck so bad where you live, here’s a thought: move. And, again, you’re now pretending your comments are something completely other than what they are.
I don’t know what your highly irregular relationship with Bender is, but tag-teaming each other to bully people who don’t agree with you, or whom you don’t like because of what their husbands do for a living isn’t exactly the behavior of devout Catholics, and I suspect the parishes you claim you serve would be horrified and embarrassed by that behavior.
Have a lovely evening.
Sally Thomas, thank you for linking to Betty Duffy’s blog. I clicked and love it, and it’s on my “check every day” list now. What a nice gift for you to give to a stranger.
I also don’t like the implication that university education is worthless, pointless, useless, bad, etc., that you and your wife are putting out there. That all sounds like sour grapes more than anything else, and a reverse snobbery that’s pretty unattractive.
?????
For one thing, my “cheerleader” is not my wife, although, because we share common views, we have become friends — friends who, living thousands of miles apart, have never even met in person. Let’s be clear on one thing — we do not “tag team,” we do not gang up on people, and we certainly have not, nor had any desire to, gang up on you.
Secondly, I’m not a doctor, never been a doctor, never wanted to be a doctor. Haven’t even played doctor for a long, long time.
No, I am actually an attorney (which was kind of obvious from what I said about lawyers), a product of many years of K-12, college, and law school, not to mention the fact, again, that it is a profession that especially requires constant and on-going learning.
And I have long been on-record, here in these pages and elsewhere, pointing out to people that learning is a life-long journey, especially learning about the faith.
Moreover, as a hardline conservative (actually, if we must be technical, a classical liberal), I have further long been on-record as forcefully promoting the free market.
BUT, I have also been on-record countless times for railing against ELITIST attitudes. (I suppose some of it comes from growing up in Ann Arbor and attending the University of Michigan.) No, those who inhabit high positions are not better than everyone else, and no one — no one — should ever want their children to think so. Nor should we be teaching them that if they don’t aspire to be a corporate executive or some similar position then they are living pointless lives no better than dirt.
That is pride talking, that is elitism talking, that is snobbery talking, that is class consciousness talking. It is not dignified, it does not raise people up.
We have an entire government filled with all these great people of prestige — Ivy League graduates all — and it is clear that they are the most ignorant folks out there. They are the most ignorant and, like most elites who think so highly of themselves, they are actually the lowest.
I don’t know why you are so defensive, I don’t know why you have apparently taken fundamental statements on humility as personal attacks, I don’t know why you have insisted on this silly argument. But elitism and pride are not virtues.
Bender has his own personal measures of success. He’ll have to tell you what they are, if he wants to.
While we are waiting for my comments in response to SMcG to come out of the spam filter, here is what I wrote on the matter nearly four years ago –
The Real Measure of Success
OK, for some reason the link did not link.
Let’s try again –
The Real Mesure of Success
OK, now we’ll wait for THAT corrected comment to come out of the spam filter.
Oh, yeah, she’s fabulous. Glad you enjoyed reading her.
I just finished reading the new book by Pauline Books and Media– Women, Sex, and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching (ed. Erika Bachiochi). This is the book I wish someone had given me when I was in my twenties. This is a collection of chapters, each written by a different Catholic woman, addressing how Church teachings support and enrich women, contrary to the assertions of many secular and dissident Catholic feminists. With regards to this discussion, I highly recommend this book’s eighth chapter, written by Elizabeth Schiltz. Here she explores the tensions between the private vocations (marriage, parenting) and public vocations (jobs, volunteer work, hobbies,etc.) and describes how the Church helps us navigate these tensions. This is not a dilemma unique to women. Both men and women must achieve and maintain such a balance. As a physician who eventually left clinical practice to be at home full time with my four children, I found Professor Schiltz’s writing supportive, comforting and realistic. Marriage and motherhood is my vocation. Medicine is my occupation. My occupation has to fit within my vocation.
Bender, for all you’re supposedly a lawyer, maybe you should have gone to one of those remedial-type institutions your special friend is limited to out in the back of beyond and worked on your critical reading skills.
I NEVER said anyone should aspire to any one position or career track. Never. I actually said that a university experience was valuable no matter what one chose to do afterwards, even if a person chooses to make a home and raise a family.
I also NEVER said anyone who didn’t aspire to a high-level professional career track (such as the one you occupy, or your friend’s husband is spending such long hours working at) was living a pointless life.
What I DID say was that denying one’s talents and assuming it was pointless to do anything with them but merely subsist until death because all earthly things would turn to dust in the end was a wrong attitude. Those words are still there.
The reason I’m defensive is because you two came in, yes, tag-teaming, something you do often, as a search of this blog reveals, and decided you didn’t like someone so you’d twist everything into something it wasn’t and then attack. You both then decided that what my husband does is just take a good picture and give pep talks while his admin does all the work.
I didn’t at all take your comments re humility personally. I ignored them, actually, because you were so off track at that point and so hell-bent on painting me as some big corporate elitist who (in spite of what I ACTUALLY said) thinks money, position and power are the only worthy goals in life.
Frankly, why don’t you re-read those comments about pride and humility and take them to heart yourself.
For the record, you little shit, I never graduated from college. I was a mother by the time I was nineteen and couldn’t continue my education. But I guess I should have aborted my daughter, continued my big elitist academic career, complete with graduate degree, so I could be just like you and your girlfriend, right? And then pretend you’re soooo humble and down to earth and Godly and holy because you demonize other people for wanting to give what YOU have to their kids.
I guess YOUR education is good, but everyone else is bad for having one or wanting one for their children.
You are an appalling hypocrite and a huge phony. And, whether you admit it or not, you’re involved in an unchaste relationship with another man’s wife — a man who is supporting this woman and their children all while you two cyber each other on the internet. What devoted Catholics you two are…right.
I am sorry that my comments have provoked such rage. In all charity, I wish nothing but good for you and your family.
It’s not rage. It’s calling you out for what you’re doing.
And I’ll pray for you too…as the song goes…
Hm, not being up on this moderator thing, I’ve been wondering whether to wade back in at all. Ultimately, I don’t want to lose sight of good and valid points raised in this discussion.
SMcG points out, rightly, that humility doesn’t require the sacrifice of excellence. My pastor often preaches on the theme of offering God our best and most highest, and I don’t think we’re ever called to shoot low in life. What I wanted to call into question were our cultural assumptions about what constitutes “low.”
In that light, Bender and Jan point out, rightly, that it is all too easy to lose sight of what “excellence” actually means in the larger picture of the Kingdom, and that this doesn’t always translate as high pay or worldly “success.”
You can serve God in the streets, and you can serve God in the CEO’s office, and people are needed, always, to do both, and everything in between. The harvest is plentiful, and it is everywhere. But again, I think this is something we all already know. It’s only worth raising here because one of the answers to the question of what education is “for” is that it’s to prepare one to discern the work to which one is called.
Bender and Jan do also have a point regarding much of higher education. In the years before my husband’s current job came along (for which we praise God every day), he taught as an adjunct in just about every college or university within a 60-mile radius of our hometown: state universities, plus private colleges of various sizes and qualities, from very good on down. In *every* one of these colleges, he encountered a handful of excellent, well-prepared students. In *every* one of these colleges, he also encountered many students who were either unable or unwilling to cope with the work he assigned, and who needed either to be pushed through a transition period to a higher level, their high schools not having done that work already, or to leave.
This state of affairs — and we could argue all day about why it exists and what to do about it, which I really don’t want to do right now — does contribute to a certain reality that the first year of college does, in fact, act as a bridge from high school to higher ed. I don’t think it’s a reason for writing off higher education, though I don’t think anyone meant to say that. It just is a reality, and not only at substandard schools.
Even in what might be considered a substandard school, however, a motivated student who finds himself or herself with this one option *can* obtain a good education. There are a lot of excellent teachers out there who don’t fit the competitive research-and-publish university model and therefore find themselves teaching in quiet corners. There are also a lot of very good adjuncts (not that I was ever biased about that
).
Just as top-tier schools can have mediocre professors, lower-rung colleges can, and often do, have hidden gems among their faculty. A degree from one of these schools may not be the entree to the professional world that a “better” degree may be, but again, that’s where discernment on the front end about what education *is,* and about where one wants to go with it, can help with this kind of prioritizing.
As for the hot and hurt feelings, I’m only a guest here, and not prepared to take anyone to task. But I would issue a general reminder that, as we know, on the internet we can’t control how our words sound in other ears, without body language or back-story to make clearer sense of what we say. And in a more or less anonymous forum, we don’t know what’s going on in people’s real lives and, in charity, should forbear to make public presumptions about anything beyond their actual arguments.
I have a longstanding habit of offering my Masses for the intentions of all my online acquaintance, whether I know (or remember!) their exact needs or not. Be assured that, as a guest here, I’m grateful to all of you for your contributions, and that you will all go with me to Mass in the morning.
And Denise — thank you for the book recommendation!