Clean Ambition

. . . . But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, “Friend, go up higher;” then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you.

Ambition is an excellent thing. As a father, nothing would dismay me more than having my daughters submit to me as husband material a man with no reasonable ambitions. (I say “reasonable” because I would not be happy with some guy whose ambition was to read every science fiction novel that had ever been written, or who wanted to be the Hobo King.)

But many, early in life, err, transgressing our Lord’s teaching by cheating to get ahead, for much of what He is talking about here involves just that. “Taking the lowest place” includes resolving not to limit one’s ambitions, but to maintain the conscience in a healthy, working state, and then taking only so much advancement as a clear conscience before Him will allow. This will most often mean taking a far lower seat than a man with healthy ambitions suspects he deserves. (It will sometimes mean taking a far higher one, which is another subject.) But if he is a Christian, he must believe his vindication will come, usually later, most often after his death, and from the hand of God, within the Ultimate, “Friend, go up higher.”

Deporting one’s self in this way requires faith, without which it is impossible to please God. It is a sin, I believe, either to kill the desire for the highest achievement--to accept the self as some sort of craven, servile, mediocrity, thus risking hell for rejecting the talents one has been given--or to step outside the rules we have for the deportment of life to rise in the estimation of the world, but not of the Lord.

This came to mind when considering the plight of older men who, to rise in this very way, capitulated when they were young to ways of thinking they knew at the time were wrong or at least questionable, but which, if they did not submit to, they knew their chances for rising in their chosen world of endeavor immediately became severely limited, if not extinguished. So they began to think and speak and write in the required way, making themselves into the critics and enemies of those who remained faithful and would not. They worked hard, built careers and reputations, rose in the world, enjoyed good salaries, the praise of men, and happy reception among the right sort of people.

But now when they are older and inexorable Death is becoming clearer on their horizon, when what they have earned by tainted ambition is becoming dull and commonplace, when they are attacked in their quiet moments by an insistent messenger called Reflection and forced to review their lives for what they have been, what do they do?

Well, many try to make amends by half-measures. They band together for the virtuous attempt to fix some of the problems they have created, not by repenting of their fundamental error and making a clean breast of it--thus admitting much of their life’s work wasted time--but in denouncing certain of its downstream effects as something they never intended. The cost of doing what they know they should would simply be too high--the moral equivalent of giving up their pensions--loss of honor privileged old men expect in compensation for the loss of youth.

This, I believe, is a very widespread phenomenon, the misery and hypocrisy of which could have been escaped in youth with firm resolution of living in a way that pleased God and letting the chips fall where they may. I know many that have been able to do this, retaining their ambition to be the very best they could be, not worrying about how far it will take them in the world, but rather doing the right thing, then standing back to see what the God who is pleased with them does with their offering. Life for people like this is very interesting, full of surprises and the testimonies of fulfilled divine promises.

Wise young men become wise old men. They are not by any means exempted from pain--only from meaningless pain, or perhaps we should say the pain of meaninglessness--which includes the terrible sadness of the old man’s secret regret.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.