“Why don’t you just send them money?” My maternal grandparents are mystified.  They want to know why my father is, at this writing, sweltering in the humid air and choking dust of Haiti.  Why should a comfortable vice-president in his sixties squander a precious vacation week every year, laboring and wheezing amidst the squalor of a trash-covered island?  A son can never fully explain his father’s business, but let me at least venture a few guesses.  Dad is risking his life in Haiti because:Read more

While in Milan, Augustine sees a happy, drunk beggar and remarks to his friends about the beggar’s sad state. But then Augustine begins to compare his own misery of trying to gain joy through fame from his knowledge and speeches, and realizes the beggar has it better. The key question, Augustine realizes, is where, or from Whom, one seeks joy.

From Augustine’s Confessions, Book 6, chapter 9-10. (italics are mine).

9. I was still eagerly aspiring to honors, money, and matrimony; and You did mock me. In pursuit of these ambitions I endured the most bitter hardships, in which You were being the more gracious the less You would allow anything that was not You to grow sweet to me. Look into my heart, O Lord, whose prompting it is that I should recall all this, and confess it to You. Now let my soul cleave to You, now that You have freed her from that fast-sticking glue of death.

….How wretched I was at that time, and how You did deal with me so as to make me aware of my wretchedness, I recall from the incident of the day on which I was preparing to recite a panegyric on the Emperor. In it I was to deliver many a lie, and the lying was to be applauded by those who knew I was lying. My heart was agitated with this sense of guilt and it seethed with the fever of my uneasiness.

For, while walking along one of the streets of Milan, I saw a poor beggar -- with what I believe was a full belly -- joking and hilarious. And I sighed and spoke to the friends around me of the many sorrows that flowed from our madness, because in spite of all our exertions -- such as those I was then laboring in, dragging the burden of my unhappiness under the spur of ambition, and, by dragging it, increasing it at the same time -- still and all we aimed only to attain that very happiness which this beggar had reached before us; and there was a grim chance that we should never attain it!Read more