Every day, on my way to work, I listen to one of the local morning radio shows, Mornings with Brant. I’m a huge fan of the hysterics and crazy antics that occur daily, but I absolutely love it when serious topics eventually pervade the silliness. One such topic was brought up the other day.

Brant, the host of the show, was talking about how we, as people, are for all intents and purposes unable to make selfless choices. The reasoning being that there is always, even if subconsciously, a motive in our choices that brings us some sense of satisfaction. I tend to agree with Brant on most things, but this is certainly not one of them.

We play catch with our child to be a good parent, or hoping they’ll love us more, as if that were even possible; we make coffee for our spouse maybe in hopes that they’ll appreciate us that much more, as if the fact that they loved us enough to marry us wasn’t enough; we go out of our way to make others feel welcome and loved in hopes that they’ll think better of us, as if the fact that we simply made the time didn’t somehow convey how much we care.

If we accept that nothing we do can ever be truly selfless, then humility is an unattainable goal, and one that God has ultimately set up for our failure (like Adam and Even in the Garden, right? *wink*). But we know better than that. God doesn’t set us up for failure, and would never ask us to do something He knew we couldn’t. That’s not what’s taught to us in Scripture; and that’s certainly not something we should be spreading as such.

It seems that the idea of making truly selfless actions outright denies any good come to the person doing the acting. This is taking it a bit far, and quite further than God intended, I’d say. C.S. Lewis, in his masterwork The Weight of Glory, touches on this very issue:

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term as been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.

And this is precisely the point, that God doesn’t wish self-denial “as an end in itself”, as Lewis says, but that through self-denial, as taught in Scripture, we receive the ultimate gifts guaranteed to us by God, that is, everlasting life in Christ, love, peace, et al.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not to strong, but too weak.

It’s not that we should outright deny ourselves, that we must at all costs base our decisions on a strict selflessness, but that we would desire the good for those around us. God wants us to desire more. And if we continue to worry about being selfish, we inevitably focus all our efforts on denying ourselves, leaving those around us without the love they so deserve and that we originally desired for them. Jesus tells us to love one another, not to deny ourselves every good thing He placed here for us.

So, my advice is this, that we forget about denying ourselves for the sake of preserving selflessness, and concentrate on loving each other, doing good to each other, making this place a little bit better for each other.