Talent

I rarely write publicly about spirituality or religion, especially my own.  But last week I went to an event where the gentleman who was speaking reinterpreted the Parable of the Talents. 

For those who are unfamiliar, the usual take from the pulpit when this passage takes its turn in the Lectionary at Sunday Mass is that God has entrusted each of us with certain gifts.  Some may have more than others, but all are called - actually, obligated - to put what gifts we have to use for world around us. And if you don't, well...in the passage, the Master expels the servant who buried his Talent "into darkness" where he will weep and gnash his teeth.

This parable more than any other has occupied my mind in adulthood. Am I using my talents to the best of my ability?  Am I using them as God intended?  What about when I get cynical and discouraged (easy to do in the non-profit world, I'm afraid) and just want to chuck it and get a corporate job and make money?  More pointedly, am I the guy in the story with the one talent, and what is the Master going to think of me when I face him with my meager return on his investment (or heaven forbid a loss)?

So I was quite taken when, listening to a speech at an awards ceremony, the speaker said he had a different take on this parable.  What if, he said, the other two servants, instead of just doing their thing in an "every man for himself" fashion, helped each other?  What if they recognized that the servant with one talent didn't know what to do, was afraid, was disoriented to point that he couldn't think of anything else but to bury the talent?  What if they had partnered with him?  They might not only have spared him from the Master's punishment, they perhaps would even have brought out the talent in him that the Master first recognized and, in so doing, increase their own return from 10 fold to 20 fold.

That really resonated with me.  None of us should have to be the guy blowing in the wind.  At some point, depending on the circumstances, we will each be the person with five talents, two talents, and one talent.  It is incumbent on us to reach out and work together for a collective impact that even the person with five talents would not be able to accomplish on her own.

I left that session inspired.  But there was still something gnawing at me. Regardless of the results, why would the Master - God - react with such anger and hostility?  He is supposed to be a compassionate ruler, and after all, the servant didn't steal his money or spend it illicitly. He did nothing worse than return what he was given.

In the past week, I have thought about this a lot, and came to the conclusion that we must still need to reinterpret some more, because it is inconceivable the God that Jesus constantly describes as loving and merciful and who he addresses as "Daddy" should act like the Master in that parable. 

That led me to borrow from psychology. As Freud and many others have shown, the ego is a powerful force within us.  I started, then, to wonder if the Master in the story is actually us.  I am all too aware of my flaws and personal insecurities, and the very real sense of failure that these can engender. Extrapolating from this to the telling of the parable, it's not a big stretch to think that the humans who wrote the Gospels from an oral tradition would have painted the Master in the way they would have expected him to act and reflecting their own deeply seated fears. The Master, then, is not a benevolent God, but our own fear of failure and separation from others.

This is a lesson I'm trying to hang on to.  When I go it alone, when I treat my organizational or personal success as a zero sum game, at best I diminish my returns and at worst I subject myself to feelings of resentment and unworthiness that are bad for me and for the ability of my organization to accomplish its mission of serving people.