Promotion At Any Price?
By Chaplain Norbert J. Karava

There is no lack of unhappy, anxious, compulsively worrying, aggrieved, yea, even angry souls to be found, wondering, waiting, scanning, scanning, scanning… Passed over? Select? It happens that with the words “passed over” comes an incurable bitterness of spirit, an unending interior and sometimes outwardly expressed diatribe against those whom the board has deemed worthy of the Lamb of Promotion, unabated remorse, and an inconsolable sense of failure. A case can be made that many of the happy “select” are, in the long run, even more unfortunate, that much the longer drinking the poison.

It all seemed to begin innocently enough: A healthy, normal desire to achieve, to succeed, to enjoy the natural rewards of negotiating the challenges that came with the profession. In other words, life, and the innate joy that came with it was the context of the profession. How has it happened that the profession has become the context of life, and that, with the loss of the profession, has come the loss of life, and therefore, the death of joy, to say nothing of love?

It has something, I think, to do with ambition, understood not as a species of courage and a driver of development and accomplishment, but as a vice and a moral illness of the soul. Ambition shares common features with all the other vices, and one of them is the loss of freedom in the shadow of obsession and compulsion.

Ancient authorities provide us with striking litanies of the outward manifestations of the soul sick with ambition. Lucretius: “For commonly, they, that like Sisyphus, roll this restless stone of ambition, are in a perpetual agony, still perplexed, doubtful, timorous, suspicious, loath to offend in word or deed, still cogging and colloguing, embracing, capping, cringing, applauding, flattering, fleering, visiting, waiting at men’s doors, with all affability, counterfeit honesty and humility.”

Thaschus Caecilius Cyprianus writing on the same, “From his hole he will climb to all honors and offices, if it be possible for him to get up, flattering one, bribing another, he will leave no means unessay’d to win all… what pains they will take, run, ride, cast, plot, countermine, protest and swear, vow, promise, what labors undergo, early up, down late, how obsequious and affable they are, how popular and courteous, how they grin and fleer upon every man they meet…”

Finally , as Cyneas the Orator declaimed to Pyrrhus, “With what waking nights, painful hours, anxious thoughts and bitterness of mind, vacillating between hope and fear, distracted and tired, they consume the interim of their time. If they do obtain their suit which with such cost and solicitude they have sought, they are not so freed; their anxiety is anew to begin, for they are never satisfied.”

As we sit, regarding the full moon and listening to the contented cicada chirpings, enjoying a rare moment of interior vacancy, the words seem to hover on the warm night air, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his very soul?” And, as we return to the index of endless worries, fears and cares, we might ask ourselves, when and how it happened that love stopped being enough?