We sometimes hear it said that we should all strive to “leave the world a better place” by the time our life here on earth ends. Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, a British army officer and founder of the worldwide Scout Movement, is often given credit for this idea, having included the advice to “Try and leave this world a little better than you found it” in his final letter to the Scouts in the late 1930s. But actually, the person who first popularized this approach to life was a woman named Bessie Anderson Stanley, who entered a magazine contest to define the word “success” in 1904. Stanley’s winning entry was as follows:
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.1
Pretty good life advice, that.
Over eighty years after Stanley penned this definition, Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who served as the Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University, added a clever twist to the admonition to leave the world a better place: “The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man.”2 Of course, we’re actually called to do both: to leave the world a better place and a better man, in another example of the famous Catholic “both/and.” Happily, if we leave the world a better person, then we also will have left the world a better place, because there will be ripple effects that radiate outward from the better person we became, hopefully touching an untold number of lives along the way.
Jesus assigns each of us a unique mission of love within his universal mission of love . . .
That’s one of the reasons why Monsignor Gilbey was right to place the greater emphasis on personal transformation. Sometimes we get too focused on fixing all the things that need to be fixed out there in the world, overlooking everything that needs to be fixed within ourselves. We can get so obsessed with removing the speck from the world’s eye that we conveniently ignore (or even completely deny) the log in our own eye (Mt 7:3-5). We all know that there’s much more than a mere “speck” in the eye of this fallen world, but we’re going to have a harder time seeing how to remove even a speck if our vision is obscured by our own sins and faults. God’s grace can flow more freely through us to bring about a transformation of the world (or at least a small improvement in the world) through our efforts if we first have opened up our hearts and minds to the power of God’s transformative grace in our own lives.
In our hubris, we may be tempted to think that it is up to us to “save the world.” But the world has, of course, already been saved (Matt. 1:21; John 3:17; 1 Tim. 1:15). It’s helpful to remind ourselves of that fact, especially during times like these when so much that is good and true and beautiful in the world is under attack and the forces of evil can seem to have the upper hand.
In our hubris, we may sometimes think that we know “what needs to be done” better than God does, but as Monsignor Gilbey also pointed out, “We are not asked to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall.”3 God knew full well what he was doing in creating the world, and God has already rectified the Fall through Jesus Christ.
Which is not to say that we have no role to play in helping to bring about the fullness of the kingdom of God. Jesus gives each of us a part in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19-20). Jesus exhorts all of us to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, a welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked, and comfort to those who are sick or in prison (Matt. 25:31-46). Jesus assigns each of us a unique mission of love within his universal mission of love4—a niche to fill, a task to accomplish. That mission may not be what we would have chosen for ourselves if it were left entirely up to our own self-centered will, but it is the mission that will enable us to become the loving person that God created us to be. And we will be much more willing and able to fulfill that mission if we first focus on putting (and keeping) our own house in order with the help of God’s love and mercy.
1 Cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
2 Cited in Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, 68.
3 Scruton, 68.
4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with God, 28-29.