Living below your station in life is usually a good thing. It’s financially wise to live modestly even if you have a high income. It’s healthy and endearing to see someone of from an A-list family rubbing shoulders with regular people.
But it is not a good idea to live below your station morally, where you know or profess something to be true and right, but the reality is you live below it. There are many who claim a standard but their private lives fall short. It’s possible, even easy, to do this. But it’s a bad thing.
Living below one’s moral profession can hurt families and churches. Most of all, it hurts the one do it. Some do it out of sinful hypocrisy–trying to reap the benefit of looking good while being bad. But some do it out for a more benign reason–they simply fail. They know the truth, but don’t live up to it. They might even feel bad about it, but they never summon the will or courage to measure up. What they should do is repent and pray and seek help and counsel and ask trusted people to hold them accountable, but for whatever reason, they don’t. They live in a kind of sad, perpetual moral failure, unwilling to overcome the gap.
As I give an example of this, I’m very aware that Jesus said, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged,” (Matthew 7:1). But I am not commenting on the state of this person’s soul, but on a contradiction in his personal life, which is publicly well-known.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great American writer, perhaps the greatest. He is known as the chronicler of the Jazz Age–the 1920’s. He wrote short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote novels, the most famous of which is The Great Gatsby. This book, though not a success during Fitzgerald’s life, has entered the American consciousness in a big way. There have been at least three movie adaptations of it.
To look at his life, you would think he had it all. He had good looks, attended Princeton, married a beautiful socialite, Zelda Sayre, and had fame from his writings. He and Zelda spent time in Paris, which was the cool thing to do among the young and popular writers back then. They went from one party to another.
But his life was mostly not happy. His wife became mentally ill and had to be institutionalized. He had a serious drinking problem. His writing seemed to decline in quality. He died of a heart attack at the age of 44.
He is an interesting (and sad) study of human behavior. He was a Catholic, and his faith seemed to provide some stability and moral guidance, but he could not seem to shake the party life.
He knew better, and we see it in his writings. For example, in The Great Gatsby, which is mistakenly seen by many as a handbook for living the cool party life, is really a warning against that life. Aside: I remember in Vietnam, stores sold a brand of men’s cologne called “Gatsby” with a logo of a man with a top hat, looking very cool.
But The Great Gatsby, if read carefully (and I’ve read it three times, it is probably the most skillfully written novel I’ve seen) does not glorify the party lifestyle–on the contrary, it condemns it.
The Gatsby character is a rich bootlegger who tries to win back an old flame. He lives in a fancy house on Long Island. He throws the greatest parties, with the best bands and catering, and all the in-crowd people go these parties to dance the night away. But in the end, everything falls apart. Gatsby is killed. No one seems too bothered about it. His friend even scrapes for people to attend his funeral. The elites who attended his parties are nowhere to be found. He was of no use to them anymore.
Far from glorifying sin, this novel condemns it. It’s like a sermon: the party-life doesn’t pay. Fitzgerald is making a point in this novel that he knew all too well from his personal life.
One of his short stories (his short stories, I believe, are at the same high level of writing as The Great Gatsby), is called Babylon Revisited. In tells of an alcoholic widower who lost custody of his daughter because of his past drunkenness. He is sober now and wants to get his daughter back from his sister-in-law, who was given custody. He’s making progress in trying to convince her that his life is changed. But then two women from his past show up and make a scene, ruining everything. The sister-in-law decides not to give him custody. The message of this short story is the same as that of The Great Gatsby–sin doesn’t pay. It can come back to bite you. This is a lesson that Fitzgerald knew intimately, and there was no one better at communicating it.
But he could never seem to live up to that truth that he personally knew so well. While he admitted that his life had degenerated into “1000 parties,” in a letter to his daughter he said that he “…really wants to preach to people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them.”
It is sad that he could never become the preacher he wanted to be, because of his own lifestyle.
The Bible speaks to us of living up to our calling. In Ephesians, chapter 4:1, Paul says: “I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” In Ephesians 4:22-24, it says, “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”
This putting off of the old self and the putting on of the new are things that we are called to do. The new life is made possible by God, but we must engage with it. That part is on us.
Let us learn from Fitzgerald’s fiction, and from his own life. He, unlike some writers, communicated some noble things about morality. His writings could make for good, eloquent sermons. But tragically, he did not seem to live up to what he believed. I hope he made peace with God before he passed away.