Success and Sacrifice

As he toured the streets of Calcutta with Mother Teresa, Senator Mark Hatfield was overcome by the magnitude of suffering he was witnessing. It was 1974 – Mother Teresa had begun serving the poor and dying of Calcutta 22 years earlier. “How can you bear the load without being crushed by it?” he asked. “My dear Senator,” she responded, “I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful.”

Perhaps the takeaway here isn’t that Christians don’t care about success; instead, the takeaway seems to be that, for the Christian, faithfulness is the definition of success. When viewing the world through the lens of the Gospel, we begin to measure and understand success in a way different from the worldly vision of success.

While perhaps a bit of a generalization, it seems fair to say that the worldly vision of success is focused primarily on outcomes and on the tactics that can achieve those outcomes most efficiently. The Christian vision isn’t averse to those considerations, but – in the fashion of Mother Teresa – is primarily concerned with questions of first principles and the human person in the light of the Gospel. Mother Teresa’s success in 1974 was not the efficient eradication of poverty from the streets of Calcutta – it was the consistent serving of persons in need around her for the love of Christ.

This primary focus on success as faithfulness, rather than mere outcomes, is found throughout the Christian tradition. Perhaps no greater icon of this reality exists than Christ himself, whose crucifixion was seen as the height of worldly failure. As one examines the tradition, one can’t help but notice that when the Christian vision of success is undertaken – when an individual or institution keeps their primary focus on remaining true to first principles that build up the human person – there is often a flowering of human goods in the long-term. Why is that?

Examples of the inverse can give helpful insight. Consider for instance, the collapse of numerous financial institutions throughout the West (including the Vatican), or the apparent degradation of so many political institutions, all within the past decades. In each case, it becomes clear as the layers are peeled back that the seemingly sudden collapses were rather the result long-term internal negligence and a failure to remain faithful to solid first principles. No mere tactics could hold back the tide. Consider further the plummeting birthrates in many modern nations, which have governments fearful about the hardships – impacting everything from national defense to the economy – that will accompany shrinking populations. Efforts to incentivize getting married and having children – generally in the form of tax breaks – are proving to be rather ineffective. The question arises as to whether plummeting birthrates could be fixed by tactics, or whether the issue can only be fixed at a deeper level, namely, the level of principles. Individuals who value family and orient their lives to sacrifice for others are likely to have children regardless of whether they’re incentivized to do so by the government, while those who don’t orient their lives in the same fashion are unlikely to step into such a major commitment due to such incentives.

What are some examples of the Christian vision of success bearing fruit in the world? Consider the economic and cultural power of the monasteries in the Middle Ages (and even into the present day): without pursuing goals of worldly economic success or cultural influence, countless monasteries nevertheless found success and influence precisely because they focused on adhering to the monastic vision of life. Consider the success of so many Catholic schools and universities which have flourished due to fidelity to the Gospel, all while utilizing the same educational “tactics” as the schools around them. Consider the Church itself, which flourished under intense persecution even in its infancy not because it had any sort of tactical advantage over the world, but simply because it was faithful to Christ and bore a message that would transform the lives of all who embraced it.

The great irony of the Christian vision of success is that it can’t rightly be used from a utilitarian standpoint: when the Gospel is embraced in order to achieve worldly outcomes, the Gospel isn’t truly embraced. But those who make the pursuit of Christ their primary aim will find that, unlooked for, human excellence has been achieved along the way.

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