Isaiah: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God” (49:4).

Keeping Score: The Divine Meaning of Success

by Regis Martin

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavor end?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

If success in this world, never mind the numerous and noisy proponents of the health and wealth gospel, is not a condition for salvation in the next, on what basis will our happiness in heaven depend? How will we be judged?

The answer is fidelity.

I thought of that the other day while watching “Person of Interest,” a weekly detective thriller staring the soulful looking Jim Caviezel. Do you know him? He’s the hero with the deep-set blue eyes and soft-spoken voice, who barely breaks a sweat, or wrinkles his shirt, while faultlessly dispatching a dozen or so villains in each and every action-packed episode.

More importantly, however, he was the fellow whose stunning portrayal of Christ back in 2004 in the Mel Gibson movie, Passion of the Christ, riveted audiences everywhere. His performance proved so compelling, in fact, that in suspending disbelief the viewer could easily imagine the actual horror of crucifixion exactly as depicted on the screen. But no sooner had the film been made, the poor fellow couldn’t seem to get a job making movies. At the time something seemed seriously wrong with that picture.

On the other hand, why should he have been treated any differently than the character he played in the film? (Now he’s back, of course, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad career move after all.)

Meanwhile, in an interview around the same time but before he became Pope Benedict XVI, the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was asked if he didn’t think it a bit off-putting to find that much of what he had worked so hard to accomplish as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had seemingly come to grief. All those warnings unheeded, appeals unheard. So much effort, so little return. His response? “I never imagined that I could, so to speak, redirect the rudder of history. And if our Lord himself ends up on the Cross, one sees that God’s ways do not lead immediately to measurable success.”

Success, as someone once said, is not a biblical category. Donald Trump continues to be a success. Mother Teresa never was. And for a while there Jim Caviezel ceased to be one.

“For most of us,” the poet Eliot writes in lines taken from Four Quartets, “this is the aim

Never here to be realized;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying.

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