The following story was related to me in a much briefer format at my Jesuit Retreat in July of 2024. The Retreat Master told this tale to show the virtue of generosity. In the story that he narrated, it involved a beggar and a nun. I have embellished the story by changing the nature of the characters and the activities somewhat. I do not know where the original tale came from but if anyone has an inkling, I would love to receive the name so that I can give credit to the author. —- John P.
Once upon a time there was a young man named Ethan who was born into a very affluent family. Ethan was brought up with all the goodies and toys that a rich family could afford. Ethan was an only child to an elderly couple who could not believe their good fortune in having a son and heir in their later days. To say he was spoiled would be an understatement. He was the epitome of the privileged child who thought he deserved everything he got. He treated the family servants like dirt. Servants in his mind were not deserving of any respect.
Perhaps because of his privilege, life was very easy for Ethan. He did not bother to try to get good grades or worry about going to college. Ethan expected to live with his elderly parents until they passed away and then the family fortune would be his. However, life often has other plans for us. Both of Ethan’s parents died in a private plane disaster. Ethan was only twenty years old but their deaths did not really trouble him very much. He assumed that he would now be rich and inherit their fortune. Which is exactly what happened.
Now on his own, Ethan took to wine, women and gambling. His father’s financial advisors tried to warn him that he was burning through the family fortune at a prodigious rate. Ethan would heed no warnings. The more warnings he received the more women he bought. The more whiskey he drank and the more he gambled. He thought nothing of buying a diamond ring or a new car for a girlfriend. The new girlfriend would be tossed out of his mansion in a few weeks only to be replaced by a new gold digger.
Finally, the inevitable happened. Ethan’s advisors told him that he was broke. Everything he thought he owned, cars, mansion, and boats would have to be sold to pay off his debts. Ethan was astounded. It took a few weeks, and an eviction notice before Ethan realized that he had no skills, no trade, no education and no money. Indeed, he had no real friends either as he soon found out. Attempts to borrow money from the bank and friends went nowhere. He was on his own.
Ethan went to a casino one night to see if he could win some of his fortune back. He ended up stone cold drunk and tossed out of the casino when they found out that he could not pay his poker bets. Homeless and penniless, Ethan hit the streets. In the next few months, he learned to live in a cardboard shack and find leftover food by dumpster diving. He learned to beg to get extra money for the gin that he was still addicted to. The other beggars and street people hated his guts. Ethan treated other homeless people as though they were inferior to him.
In the area where Ethan now lived, there was a monastery. Each day, the nuns would serve a hot meal, soup, or sandwiches to the street people. These meals were served between the hours of 11:30 AM and 1:30 PM. Whenever Ethan would go there, he would try to arrive as late as he could so that he did not have to associate with any of the other homeless people. He regarded them as bums and still saw himself as superior to them.
One day, Ethan arrived at the monastery too late for lunch. He had fallen asleep under a tree in a local park and did not wake up until about 3 PM. Nevertheless, he showed up at the monastery to try to get some food. He banged on the door until a young novice nun opened the door. “What can I help you with,” she inquired. “Took your own sweet time to get here,” he belligerently replied. “I want some food.” “I am sorry,” Sister Regina said, “but the kitchen is closed, and we have no food prepared.” “Don’t give me that bullshit, you have food, you are just too lazy to help another human being. I thought your Jesus said to feed the hungry. Well, I am hungry now and I want some food now.”
Sister Regina thought about it for a minute but just then another Sister came to the door. “Go away,” said the other Sister and “come back tomorrow at the proper lunch time.” “No, that’s all right,” said Sister Regina, “I will try to find something for him to eat.” She asked Ethan to “please wait here while I fix something for you to eat.” Ethan agreed but warned her to hurry up as he was really hungry.
Sister Regina went to the kitchen refrigerator and found some different lunch meats. She located some bread and mayonnaise and made a nice cold cuts sandwich. She grabbed a small lunch bag and put the sandwich in the bag. Just as she was headed out of the kitchen, she noticed a candy bar on a shelf. She thought this would make a nice desert and proceeded to pack the bar in with the sandwich.
When she arrived back at the door, she opened the door and Ethan was waiting there. She told Ethan that she had found some cold cuts and made him a sandwich. Ethan grabbed the bag and replied that she had taken her damn sweet time about it. He went away without saying another word.
Ethan walked to his private place in the park under his favorite tree. He sat down and plucked the sandwich from the bag. He took his time to eat the sandwich which he thought was very good. He was about to throw the bag away, when he noticed that there was something else in the bag. He reached inside the bar and found the candy bar. At that point, something very mysterious happened. Ethan thought “Well, I wonder why she gave me a candy bar? Perhaps she was being nice to me. I wonder why she would do that?” That is when it struck him.
She was nice to him when he was a jerk towards her. She did not have to include the candy bar. Maybe I have been a jerk my whole life, he thought. The more he thought about it, the more ashamed he was of the way he treated her and other people. Somehow, sitting under that tree, Ethan resolved to change his life. From now on, he was going to be kind to other people and to help them out when he could. He would start today by going back to the monastery and apologizing to the young novitiate.
It was getting late and around about supper time when he arrived back at the monastery. He knocked gently on the door and waited. The door opened and it was the other Sister who had told him to go away before. “What do you want,” she asked? “I would like to speak to the young Sister that made the sandwich for me,” he said. “Wait right here.” he was told, “I will see if she is available.”
Sister Regina came to the door and greeted Ethan. “What can I do for you,” she inquired? “Nothing,” replied Ethan. He than got down upon both knees and said “I am so sorry for the way that I treated you before. I did not even deserve a sandwich and yet you took the time to make it for me and even add a candy bar. I want you to know how grateful I am to you for that. You have helped me to see the world completely differently. From now on, every day I will come here early to help make lunch for the other homeless people and to help out any way I can.” Sister Regina recognized that Ethan was sincere, and she told him how happy they would be for his help.
Ethan did just as he said he would. He showed up every day early to help prepare food and left late after the dishes and the kitchen had been cleaned. Within a year, the Sisters voted to hire Ethan as a cook and custodian. He lived in the monastery another fifty or so years until he passed away. Before he died, he asked to see Mother Regina who had now become the head of the monastery. Taking her hand, he told her how blessed he was to have had her come into his life. He had lived a life that he wanted to and had no regrets. No amount of fame or fortune could ever equal the happiness that he had found by helping others.
“I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.” — Michelle Obama
As years have gone by, I have learned from the sages (who profess to know these things) that “being” is more important than “doing” in terms of defining who we really are. In other words, just because I work as a management consultant or educator, that job title does not describe the real me. The real me exists apart from what I do to make a living or to earn a paycheck. I discovered that It would take an epic journey of soul searching to find my real being, the real me. Ever since I learned that I needed such a quest to know my true inner self, I have been struggling to find out who I really am. I am now 73 years old and I am still wrestling with this question.
Socrates said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” These words were reportedly spoken at his trial for corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates believed that living a life where you unthinkingly obey the rules of society and never stop to examine what you actually want out of life is not worth living. I believe that Socrates was thinking too much. It is relatively easy to know what one wants out of life. I want happiness, money, good health, good love, good sex, good food, interesting friends, a challenging and meaningful job and a perhaps a few exceptional children or two to round things out. I am not sure what else I would want if I delved into the issue any deeper.
On the other hand, what if we are not faced with a coin here but with a Mobius Strip. So there are not two sides but only one side. Unlike a two-sided coin, there is no division in a Mobius Strip. This is more of an Eastern perspective on life. Thus, being rolls into doing without any breaks and doing rolls back into being. Life is simply be-do-be-do-be-do. If this is what life is really about, then trying to separate the two ideas is simply impossible. When I do, I am being and when I am being, I am doing.
publish their lists of the most beautiful people in the world. Beautiful people marry other beautiful people and are constantly in the news. The Kardashians would seem to have few talents except their almost incredible beauty. Rich men marry beautiful women. Beautiful actresses marry NFL football players. Beautiful heiresses marry rock stars while beautiful rock stars marry record producers.
I once asked my MBA students whether they would rather be smart or beautiful. They almost unanimously selected beautiful. I was very surprised but the more I have observed about life, the more it would seem that beauty will get you further than brains. Brains can get you some things but being nerdy is not one of the things that most people aspire to. Anti-intellectualism is a fact of American life as noted by Richard Hofstadter in his famous book: “Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 1963.”
As we both have aged, the process of deterioration taking place in our bodies is clear in the more wrinkled, wizened and paunchy body shapes we now exhibit. While neither of us was ever beautiful by societies standards, we never had any chance of making any top ten beautiful lists before and certainly not today. Nevertheless, when I see my spouse in her pajamas or in the shower or when she cuddles up in bed with me, I can’t help but think how beautiful she is and how much I love her. While I still see the shades of societies standards of beauty in the many young models punctuating my daily life, the beauty I see in my wife is something I cannot describe. It is a beauty that comes from who she is and not how she looks. I only know she is more beautiful to me today than she was 35 years ago when we first started dating.
You can claim as you grow older that you either have regrets or you have no regrets. I have had at least one friend who on his deathbed made the claim that he had no regrets. I admired his attitude very much. I wanted to emulate this attitude as I grew older, but try as I might it has escaped me. I can tell you I have no regrets, but it would be a big lie. I have enough regrets to write a book about. One of my regrets is that I am shorter than my father was. He was six feet four inches 
tall and I barely make five feet eight inches. Mostly though, I wonder what it would have been like to have been born handsome. To have had the looks of Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Brad Pitt or Robert Redford. Would I have used my looks to achieve fame and fortune or would I have simply squandered it away on wine, women and song? How much different would my life have been if I had been a “beautiful” person?
I understand and fully believe that like ingratitude, (Please read my blog on
There have been many theories proposed for the policies held by Trump and his Republican supporters. They include “Greed Theory.” The Republicans are held to be greedier than most people and only want to accumulate as much money as they can. Another is “Hate Theory.” This theory holds that since most Republicans are White European in ancestry, they loath and detest any people who are different then they are. This includes Asians, Blacks, Indians, Latinos and any immigrants not from Europe.
About a week later, I was substitute teaching in a Casa Grande High School. I drew an eleventh-grade social studies class. The teacher had left an assignment wherein the students had to find certain terms and concepts associated with the second industrial revolution and write definitions for each of them. Included among such terms as: robber barons, corporations, patents and trusts was the term “Social Darwinism.” One of the students asked me to explain it beyond the simple definition she found on line. I tried to recall my ideas relating to this concept from many years ago. I gave her my explanation and then later I looked up the definition at Wikipedia. I was struck at how well my memory had served me. It was at that point that the proverbial light bulb or blinding light of inspiration hit me. I suddenly realized that the Republican Party was not just trying to create elite systems but they were also trying to build on the theories of Herbert Spencer. The following excerpt explains this theory very well as it applies to many current concepts such as: trickle down theory, privatization, corporate welfare and tax reform.
So, there you have it. Trump and the Republican Party are not greedy, hateful or fearful of others, they simply do not believe that you have a right to anything unless you are also rich and successful and White like they are. Based on the concepts of Social Darwinism, they have the right to whatever you have if they can find a way to take it away from you. If you cannot keep it, that means you are inferior. If you are inferior, you have no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. According to Social Darwinism, the elite will eventually Trump the poor because they are stronger, smarter and more fit. This will eventually result in a society wherein everyone is fit, and everyone is trying to screw everyone else.
Aging Capriciously 