Of Soap Operas, Duties, and Charity!

Is your life like a soap opera? What will happen next?

I've come to the conclusion that everybody on the planet lives in a soap opera. And, in fact, that's probably the reason soap operas are popular. Focusing on the problems of your favorite soap characters takes your mind off your own personal, homegrown drama for at least a little while.

I've been in the midst of my own soap opera adventure the past few months with someone who's not in my immediate family. So I took the question of responsibility to my spiritual director and asked what my obligation was to the person involved? I'm a dutiful person and want to act in a way that I never fail to do my duty.  I've often talked to Father about the priorities of obligation. They begin with my obligation to God, then to my spouse, my children, my parents (even after death), and my grandchildren. The farther one gets from the immediate family the fewer the obligations. 

While Father said I had no moral obligation to act in the particular situation we were discussing, we all have obligations, he said, to perform the virtue of charity. It's the second of the two great commandments -- to love your neighbor as yourself. And when a person is part of your extended family, the sense of obligation certainly becomes more compelling even if you are not actually morally obliged to do anything other than pray.

There are limits, of course, based on the giver's age, health, finances, etc. And we can certainly express those limits to the people we help and explain where we draw the line. But, having said that, charity is still the moral obligation of every Christian.

While duty and charity are related, they are distinct from each other. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a long entry on duty which includes this:

Duty is a debt owed to the rational nature, of which the spokesman and representative is conscience, which imperatively calls for the satisfaction of the claim. But is this the be-all and the end-all of duty? The idea of duty, of indebtedness, involves another self or person to whom the debt is due.

Okay...so the obligations of duty require that a person, in justice, provides for the debt owed to another. If you owe someone something, it is not charity to give it. If I buy a car, the money I spend has nothing to do with charity. It's a financial obligation.

Charity on the other hand is, in one sense, obligatory because it is part of the commandment: to love our neighbor as ourself. But charity, in a particular situation, is a grace and a gift rather than a duty and obligation.

How one exercises charity and to whom becomes a matter of discernment. Of course we owe all persons, including our enemies, the charity of prayer and the desire for their good. But beyond that, how we exercise charity becomes a matter of conscience. 

In my soap opera life, I remember my mom's admonition that "Charity begins at home." And so, when I see a member of my extended family in great need, perhaps alone and abandoned, how can I not help?

I had an unfortunate brother who spent some times homeless and on the streets. I called him my "great" brother because for awhile he was living on a "grate." For a long time we didn't even know where he was. He was angry because we didn't contact him when our dad died. "How could we," I asked him. I called an aunt in California who had the last contact with him and she had no idea where he was. "What could we do, Tom, advertise in every paper in the country?"

Poor Tom died in his fifties, I think in 1996," of a sudden and massive heart attack the first of my nine siblings to die. I still grieve for him and treasure a letter exchange we had for a time when he was unjustly imprisoned by an evil psychiatrist who was using him to launder money. When Tom turned him in to the IRS, he not only had my brother falsely involuntarily hospitalized but had his son break into Tom's apartment. He also physically assaulted another doctor who had taken Tom's side. Talk about a soap opera! I'm committed to the charity now of praying for the repose of Tom's soul and often have Masses said for him. I beg your prayers for him as well. How much I long to see him again in heaven. 

But I have opportunities now to treat the living in unfortunate circumstances the same way Mother Teresa did, seeing in them Jesus in His most distressing disguises. And I will continue to try to do my best until the day I die. I know I will often fall short, but I will never do nothing because I can't do everything.

Please, Lord, don't let me fail in either my obligatory duties or the gratuitous "duties" of Christian charity. Let me do all for the love of Christ which sanctifies duty and raises the act of charity from the natural level to the supernatural level.

Our Lady of Charity, pray for us.