Real Life
Seeing past the illusions of wealth
Last Thursday afternoon the weather was so beautiful that I decided to walk to the Spiritual Life Center at Masonic and Oak Street for my monthly appointment with my spiritual director. It is a bit of a walk, down 8th and through Golden Gate Park to the Panhandle. As I was walking up Oak Street, I noticed a shirtless man at the corner of Oak and Cole, who appeared to be homeless. He was bent over, scurrying around the street corner.
I couldn’t tell what he was doing from a distance. I sighed, internally, and thought, “I hope he isn’t doing something crazy.” I could feel my body tighten, just a little, with fear. When I got closer, I realized that he had a brush in his hand and was sweeping the dirt and trash into the sewer. He was tidying up the corner. As I walked by I said, “Good afternoon, thank you for doing that.” He looked up for second and said, “You’re welcome,” and went right back to work.
As I walked by, I remembered the woman who lives nearby on the corner of 8th and Clement Street, just a block away from my home. Her possessions are neatly stored, and she sleeps in the doorways on the northeast corner. She is meticulous about her appearance and has taken responsibility for sweeping the sidewalks around the busy intersection. In the midst of poverty and mental illness, she carries herself with dignity. I don’t know how she does it.
These are modest glimpses of humanity, of our desire to be of service and to maintain self-respect under terrible conditions. It is hard to keep from averting our gaze when we see such suffering, because it is heart-breaking, frightening, and conscience-searing. But if we wish to “take hold of the life that really is life” – or as another translation puts it – “take hold of the life that is real”1 – we have to see the whole of reality. Real life includes rich and poor and everything in between, inextricably bound together in a single garment of destiny.
Jesus tells the story of a rich man, tradition names him “Dives,” which is simply a Latin word meaning “rich man,” so we will call him Dives.2 Dives is completely unaware of the suffering of Lazarus just outside his gate, starving and covered with sores. Even the dogs, who lick Lazarus’ sores, are more aware of what is going on than Dives. He doesn’t see and doesn’t want to see. To actually see Lazarus would disrupt the illusions upon which Dives has built his life.
The first illusion is that wealth is a sign of our virtue. “Dives” is related to the Latin, “divus” or “divinity.” To be wealthy is to be “divine” or at least favored by the gods. Most of us would say we no longer believe such nonsense. We know that there is no correlation between wealth and virtue. In fact, all the saints have followed the path of downward mobility! But we are not so clear about the false narrative that equates poverty with depravity. We approach the poor like I did walking down the street Thursday afternoon: with trepidation.
The truth is that wealth often does provide a false sense of moral superiority. One is no longer bound by the rules that everyone else has to follow. This is the essence of privilege. It means no longer having to bother with real life and its consequences. Dives never pauses to contemplate the relationship between his wealth and other people’s poverty, to inquire as to what obligations he might have to the common good. These are some of the hard questions of real life that we would rather avoid, but do so at our peril.
This is related to another illusion of wealth: the belief that it can protect us from harm. Our money will secure us against threats of violence, loss, illness and old age. It will shelter us from our vulnerability, unlike those on the street who literally have no shelter. We set our “hopes on the uncertainty of riches” rather than “on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”3 St. Anthony the Great said, “Our life and death is with our neighbor.” If we think that the condition of our neighbors does not affect us, and vice-versa, then we are living in a fantasy world.
Our wealth cannot free us from the changes and chances of life, any more than it can free us from moral responsibility for our actions. This is the shattering truth implicit in the global climate crisis, and why so many still deny this truth. Beyond the baseline of provision for our basic needs, wealth does not give us freedom. In fact, it can become a corrupting and addictive end in itself, locking us within a prison of our own making, cutting us off from real life and from the cost others pay for the prison we have built.4
The word “mammon,” translated as “wealth” in the New Testament, literally means “that in which we put our trust.” It isn’t wealth per se that is the problem. It is the self-image that we build around it. It gives us our identity. This is the very definition of idolatry: deriving our identity from anything other than God, in whose image all have been created.
Those of us who are rich, relatively speaking, do pay a price for our illusions, “piercing ourselves with many pains.”5 We may be rich in things, but poor in relationships, in a sense of belonging, bereft of fellow-feeling, of compassion, of a sense of responsibility for our place in the interconnected web of life – real life. We can become isolated from the fellowship and mutual care of community, of communion with God and others, which constitutes true wealth.
To trust in God is to entrust ourselves to love, to relationship, to the care of others that is, finally, the only secure hedge against our vulnerability. Our wealth cannot protect us from the future, but love can. Who you love, not what you own, is the measure of the life that really is life. More love. More life. We must learn to love everyone and everything, if we are to save anything at all; including our souls.
This is true now, in this life, and in the life of the world to come. Dives learns this the hard way, in Hades. Only in death does Dives perceive Lazarus’ identity as a fellow child of Abraham, one whose name literally means “God has helped.” Here we must acknowledge the element of judgment in Jesus’ story. In Hades, Lazarus finds consolation, but Dives, torment. I read this parable as a warning that if we do not take hold of real life now, we will regret it later. Not always and forever: there is nothing in Jesus’ parable that speaks of eternal punishment.
The biblical texts neither laud nor hate the rich. They speak of pity for them and of concern for their souls. In Hades, Dives begins to experience sincere regret, the pangs of conscience, and a newly emerging concern for others – “warn my five brothers about this torment,” he begs. He is experiencing the fire of love, purifying him of his illusions so that he can, eventually, take hold of real life – eternal life. I have hope for Dives because I trust God’s mercy, but his experience should give us pause. It is never too late, but why wait until later to choose real life? Real life doesn’t have to wait until we die.
Jesus invites us to see each other – to really see each other – whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between. And to tell the truth to each other about each other. One of the remarkable things about the early Christian communities was the degree of economic diversity within them. The churches were one of the few social spaces in antiquity where people of different classes related to each other on a basis of relative equality. This wasn’t without tension, as evidenced by the New Testament texts. But these texts invite us to wrestle with the hard questions of real life together.
Our life and death is with our neighbor: even the neighbors who are difficult to see because we are blinded by the illusions of wealth. Christian community is about learning to see each other, so that together we can take hold of the life that really is life. What does real life look like? What illusions about wealth are inhibiting your capacity to see reality? In whom or what do you really place your trust?
I Timothy 6:19. See David Bentley Hart’s translation in his The New Testament: A Translation.
Luke 16:19-31.
I Timothy 6:17.
For a contemporary example related to the climate crisis, see Jeffrey Sachs, “Pakistan and the fight for climate justice,” Project Syndicate: The World’s Opinion Page (Sept. 13, 2022).
I Timothy 6:10.