
It’s hard not to envy the amoral, especially if you’re dutifully trying to be faithful to. It’s one thing to be responsible and dutiful, it’s quite another be grateful for living that way. The danger is that, like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, we end up doing the right thing and then becoming bitter about having to do it. What happens then is that we stand outside the circle of the dance, angry, secretly jealous of the amoral, protesting that life isn’t fair, that God isn’t fair: “I’ve stayed home, done my duty, never seriously strayed, and now the fuss is all about others who have had a fling and haven’t been as faithful as I!” Check out your reaction to this, namely, a classical death-bed conversion. You hear tell of a man who lives his life entirely oblivious to spiritual and moral affairs. He is interested rather in other kinds of affairs. A dilettante, irresponsible, selfish, he deems life only for the pleasure it can bring. He pursues the good life, pleasures of every kind, comfort, luxurious vacations, sexual irresponsibility, without a thought to God, the poor, or duty of any kind. And so he lives from his youth until old age. Then, just before dying, he repents, makes a sincere confession, and dies prayerfully, throwing himself into the arms of God at the last minute in genuine sincerity. What’s your spontaneous reaction to that? The lucky beggar! He got to have a fling and now he gets heaven besides! Yet like the older brother of the prodigal son, we have not yet understood God’s grace. If we understood the grace we live in then, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, we would be deeply grateful because someone who has missed out on so much of life has finally, again, come back to life. What a sincere death bed conversion reveals is that going the way of the Prodigal Son does not constitute life, but is a stepping away from it, an abandoning of happiness, an act of despair. But God, as the parable of the Prodigal Son makes clear, is equally as gentle with the bitter as with the prodigal. The Father’s words to the older brother as just as loving and forgiving (and revealing) as are his words to the prodigal son: “My child, you have always been with me and everything I have is yours.” When one owns everything, he or she does not become bitter and jealous over someone else’s pleasure. Grace, like the sun, is free and its warmth and light dwarf all else.[1]
[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “On Envying the Amoral” April 2002.