Social Security, Providence, and Responsibility

Fr. Jim O’Reilly walked with a major-league gimp.  It seemed to me that for every three-foot stride of forward progress, a bad hip tossed his head back and forth about the same distance.  Despite all of this zigzag movement, his face constantly framed a certain mischievous smile.  He always gave me the impression that he had something on me, like he knew something that I’d rather he didn’t know, that at any moment he’d blurt it out publicly, whatever that truth was.  But this time as he walked past a number of his fellow Jesuits in the dining room at Manresa Jesuit Retreat House, he motioned me over, and then bent close to my ear to share a private comment.  “Don’t ever retire around Jesuits; they’ll give you three jobs!”  In his case, it was true.  He worked - and still works - at Loyola High School, in the adjoining parish, and as a Spiritual Director and mentor for trainees.

We had a visit from a couple of Jesuit friends on Saturday.  As soon as they pulled into the driveway, I realized that they were sacrificing something that I was not.  I’m not speaking of celibacy.
I’m speaking of never retiring.  O’Reilly was right.  These guys just get deeper and deeper in the trenches.  And so as I opened my arms to embrace Leo Cachat, I shared my embarrassment with being retired.  He dodged my seriousness by joking, “Retarded?  You’ll never be retarded!”  I see the same to be true, this never retiring, among Sisters of Mercy I know.  Most of them who are past 62 had worked in Catholic schools that excluded them from Social Security or pension, and these women confide in me that they feel obligated to work as long as they can “for the older sisters” who need care in their infirmity and aging, many in their 90s and even 100s.

I see an irony here.  We non-religious laymen and women are told that we are entitled to retirement.  And there is a further wrinkle in this.  While in our working lives many of us were consoled and encouraged by the belief or at least hope that “God provides.”  I confess that despite what I think of as a strong faith, I often go to my planning spreadsheet and not my God when I begin worrying about whether we have what we need to live.  The consolation that comes these days that the numbers seem to suggest we’re OK until our 90’s comes with a trap: entitlement.  We can easily feel entitled to our financial security.  After all, we saved for retirement; we earned it.  The slide from trust and providence to conservation and thrift saps life.

Alan Watts published The Wisdom of Insecurity in 1951.  He describes its premise:

I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the "backward law". When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath you lose it - which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it."  This book is an exploration of this law in relation to man's quest for psychological security, and to his efforts to find spiritual and intellectual certainty in religion and philosophy. It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.

I think that plunging into the pool of God’s ineffability shows us both the insecurity of “Social Security” and a way of living life that provides day by day both a call to usefulness and  one to accept with gratitude and joy all that we are given – to eat and to do.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.