Editorial May 21, 1990 Issue

Reflected light

Ann Kenrick

Personal attainment is often glorified in public discussion these days. People seem to enjoy reading and hearing about other people who have made a lot of money and risen to the top of their profession through whatever means they deemed necessary. Yet on the darker side many corporate raiders who amassed huge fortunes in the 1980s have become victims of their own success; they are now in deep debt and their companies bankrupt. Other figures, made famous by the media, have fallen from their pinnacles and face jail terms for their illegal activities.

I came across a book of Aesop's fables the other day that I had enjoyed when I was a child. Thumbing through the pages, I came to one of my old favorites, which it seems to me has a moral that is as contemporary as today and tomorrow. It tells of an oil lamp that burned with a clear and steady light. Soon it began to swell with pride and to boast that it shone more brightly than the sun. Just then, a puff of wind blew it out. Someone lighted it again and said, "You just keep alight, and never mind the sun. Why, even the stars never need to be relit as you had to be just now."^{"The Lamp," Æsop's Fables (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 49 .}

Perhaps the lesson in this fable for us today is that self-importance and pride easily undermine our work when the motive is self-glorification. Personal achievement is vulnerable to chance and failure unless we understand something of undeviating good, which has its source in God.

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