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It is helpful, in organizations, to find an answer to the question, “How do we measure success?” How we measure success derives from our purpose and motives. For a business, success is usually measured in numbers: dollars and cents, sales and profits, customers and market share. Numbers are easy to measure, easy to compare, and easy to understand. This is not so in the Society, given that our primary purpose is our own growth in holiness, and our motive is to serve for love alone. The only numbers we might be able to use are numbers we cannot know, such as how many of us end up in heaven. And so, we measure our success in other ways, ways that are not always quantifiable. Each of us must individually ask, after each meeting, after each home visit, after each moment of service, “Am I a better Christian for having done this?”
As for the outcome of our service, we might be tempted to quantify what we’ve done by tallying up numbers of people assisted, or dollars raised and spent, much like a business might do. Yet by such measures, an increase in poverty would surely make our “numbers” look better, even as they show, in another sense, we are failing God’s command “to do all we can to ensure that there may cease to be any [poverty].” [O’Meara, 177] Given that the poor will always be with us, St. Vincent guides us here, teaching that “God does not consider the outcome of the good work undertaken but the charity (love) that accompanied it.” [CCD I:205] But what is the measure of love?
On the other side of the ledger, there always floats anther question, one that haunts us, “How do we measure failure?” For businesses, again, that measurement is simple, and sometimes final, if losses rather than profits lead to the literal failure, bankruptcy, and dissolving of the company. For us, gaining heaven (or not) is even more final, yet unknowable to us, here and now. It can be tempting, then, to try desperately to find works and prayers that will get us into heaven, and by doing so, elevating the works above the love we are called to bring. We wear ourselves out, each of us merely a human doing. We can then lose sight of our motive of love, and our purpose of not only serving Christ, but of emptying ourselves in order to filled by Him, living no longer ourselves, but Christ living in us. “For He became Man that we might be made God,” St Athanasius teaches. [Inc., LIV:2]
Our formation, we are taught, is a lifelong process of becoming what God wishes us to be, and what Christ has fully revealed to us: our own nature, and what it is to be human. [RH, 10] If the outcome of our works belongs to God, as Vincent says, then to fail is not to try, not to give of ourselves, not to unite ourselves fully with Him through the love that we share with each other and the poor, not to do the good we can, but trust the rest to God. [Baunard, 81] If each of us can cease to be merely a human doing, but also a human being, we will already be, as we are meant to be, of and in the kingdom.
Contemplate
How do I seek to empty myself to make room for God?
Recommended Reading
15 Days of Prayer with Blessed Frédéric Ozanam
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