Franklin Rides Again: January Newsletter Article

A little closer to the end of the month than normal for my Franklin´s Choice entry, but this is a big one: “Do we matter?” How do individual lives matter in the context of community, of the world? Now THERE´S a question.

Of course, the answer of nearly everyone for the past few hundred years, at least in Western society, is that yes, of course individual people matter. It´s a reflection of the Renaissance humanist ideal, this grand concept that we´re more than just pieces in the social machine, but beings with our own separate, beautiful identities. It is, quite possibly, THE defining philosophical concept in the formation North American society – after all, how is “rugged individualism” able to exist without the basic presupposition that we all matter, or at least have the capacity to matter?

Maybe that´s a key place to start – do we believe that everyone matters, or that everyone has the potential to matter? The two are fairly distinct in their implications, after all, and honestly, I think U.S. society, and quite probably global society on the whole, falls on the side of the latter, no matter what we say we believe. How many times have you heard a person protest when asked to do something new or big or different that they just can´t because they´re “only” a whatever the excuse of the day is? We assign value, sadly most of the time, based on merit and not on inherent worth – “Well, Doctor Whoseit is such an amazing man…he went to medical school at Yale, he´s practically an Olympic-level athlete, he´s nice to everyone, and he´s even got cute kids back at his big house with the pool and the hot tub. “

In contrast, I´ve never heard anyone say something like “María is amazing! She sacks groceries, is amazingly kind to everyone in the store, loves her little daughter, works incredibly hard.” People may very well talk about María and extol some of her good qualities, but I´ve never heard a sentence like this completed without the inclusion of other details to make it clear that María is no Doctor Whoseit – the fact the she doesn´t speak English, her lack of a high school education, her being a single mom, her only making minimum wage.

I think back to October and November, my first bit of time here. There were all sorts of conversations at the church about spiritual gifts and stewardship, “how can I use what God´s given me, just for being born, in God´s Kingdom?” Carla, our neighbor and one of the most hospitable people I´ve met in my life, struggled a lot with this question, and I think still does. “I don´t have a gift,” she would explain. I, meanwhile, could not disagree more. This is a person who, consistently since we´ve been here, has invited three volunteers, speaking varying levels of Spanish, into her home to share a meal with her and her family – and always delicious meals, at that. She always stops to talk to us, as a group or as individuals, when we bump into her during the course of the day. That sort of care and attention to other people is a gift.

Of course, that teeters dangerously close to the brink of ascribing worth to Carla because she makes the world´s best cannelloni and chooses to share them with me. Maybe the fact that we all matter is reflected in the fact that we can look at anyone and come up with things that they do that are exceptional, even if on the surface they seem like ordinary actions, but I don´t think that in and of itself says that everyone matters just because they are. Maybe that´s the difference between us and God – I can´t judge a person´s worth without merit, of one form or another no matter how universally I find it, without their actions coming into play, but God can look beyond all that and find value in us not because we are something, but just because we ARE.