There But For Fortune

I remember a particularly stormy Christmas Eve. I had volunteered to work the only evening shift that could not be dispensed with. I had to drive into San Francisco, make a pick up at a mailroom almost under the Bay Bridge and drive back to San Jose. It was raining hard when I made my right turn out of the parking lot. There were many puddles reflecting the yellow city lights. I stopped at a red stoplight wanting to make another right hand turn, but I couldn't do it. Two people stepped into the crosswalk and were crossing in front of me, very slowly.

I was impatient. I had a family to get home to, a traditional story to read to them before bed, and wanted to spend some of that traditionally sacred time with my wife. I said something out loud. "Would you idiots hurry up." It wasn't under my breath but I didn't think it was loud enough for them to hear it either. Unfortunately, I had rolled down the window a bit so my windshield wouldn't fog up. They were just getting past my van, but not quite.

The woman stopped still, peered at me through the rain and came up to the driver's window. "Don't call us that," she said with some force. "Our parents called us that and we hate it!" She took her brothers hand and walked away. I suddenly realized what I had done. I called a mentally handicapped brother and sister idiots the night before Christmas. Their gift from me was to awaken a painful memory for them on the night Jesus came into the world.

I was full of remorse, wanting to do penance and to somehow cleanse a soul that was suddenly filthy on Christmas Eve. I was was a grown man, 29 or 30 years old, and I too was full of pain, sobbing and wiping away tears as I drove onto the Bayshore Freeway.

It was lesson that I need to learn over and over again. I had a home beaming with Christmas lights and little children to comfort me. They had each other and probably an old dingy apartment. What was sending me home to a house of love and them not? Fortune--pure and simple. And yet, for that impatient instant, I thought that I was the god born into this world--the one on whom Christmas depended. I was congratulating myself on my act of charity; saying to my soul, "Soul, what a fine man you are." And that's when my dagger struck.

Ecclesiastes tells us that "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and circumstance happen to us all." In other words, fortune and fate.

One of my favorite folk songs is Phil Ochs' "There But for Fortune." Here are a couple of verses.

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Show me a prison, show me a jail

Show me a pris'ner whose face has grown pale

And I'll show you a young man

With many reasons why

There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me an alley, show me a train

Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain

And I'll show you a young man

With many reasons why

There but for fortune, go you or I.

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And that's the truth of it. We can talk about our pre-mortal valor and their pre-mortal squalor if we want to, but the Lord laughs if we do and holds us all in derision. The truth of it is we have a tremendous obligation to those who are less fortunate, both as individuals and as a society. It ought to make us think twice when we notice that those who complain about government taxes coercing charity turn out to be the same ones who assume their own pre-mortal valor. It ought to make us think twice when those same people defend government enforced construction, destruction, killing and so forth. But so very often, the truth is we do as a people have an obligation and that government is often the very best way to meet it.

As a Christian, I very much worry about my Christmas sin. I think we should all worry that as a society, too often we're not only failing to meet our obligations, but sometimes rather flippantly inflicting pain and sorrow.