Success — That Wouldn’t Be Enough
By Dr. Julie Ooms
As Christians, should we want to be successful?
At first glance, that question seems pretty innocuous, and its answer obvious. Of course, our thinking might go, of course we should want to be successful. We’re given gifts in order to use them, and use them well. We might point to the importance of providing for our families, or mention the Protestant work ethic. We might quote from the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25, where the servants who invested what their master gave them were praised and lifted up, while the servant who buried his talent in the ground was chastised, called a “wicked and slothful servant” (Matthew 25:16) and a “worthless” one (verse 30), and cast “into the outer darkness” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (verse 30). Let us not be worthless, wicked, and slothful, we might pray. Let us instead use what we have been given and gain success.
What exactly is success, though?
Many people, when tasked with defining a word, would look up its dictionary definition first (or, more likely, just google it). Before doing that, though, think a moment about the contexts in which we use the word. How would you describe a successful person? A successful trip? A successful college career? A successful feature film?
My guess is that you would tie success first to wealth, to fame, or to status — and only secondarily to truth, or virtue, or meaningfulness. A film is successful if it earns a certain dollar amount at the box office; it may also be an excellent, a truthful, or a meaningful film, but those qualities don’t guarantee its success. A successful family vacation might be one that was well-planned and went off without a hitch, but good hotel rates and a smooth trip along the road don’t guarantee that the family grew closer or learned something about the world and each other. A successful college career might end with a high overall GPA, low debt, a diploma, and a job, but whether that job would enable the new graduate to serve others and build God’s kingdom isn’t a requirement of success. And indeed, once we do look up “success” in the dictionary (or, in this case, the Oxford English Dictionary’s webpage), we find that the most prominent definition is “the attainment of wealth, fame, or social status.” There’s nothing there about being a virtuous person, or helping others, or furthering a Kingdom that’s larger than any one person.
The problem is, of course, that for so many of us — and I hear this from my students and my friends as much as I hear it echoing in my own mind — it’s so, so, important that we succeed. We don’t want to be worthless and wretched, like the servant in the parable, cast out of the master’s house into the dark and the cold. What we need is a new of thinking about purpose, a new way of interpreting that parable and the meaning of our own lives.
Here is where I think the recent hit musical Hamilton, and its titular couple, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton, can help.
Think of the Hamiltons as opposite sides of the coin of success. Alexander Hamilton strides through life devoted to success as I’ve defined it so far: he wants a name for himself, he wants fame, he wants status. “I’m not throwing away my shot,” he states in “My Shot,” one of the earliest songs in the musical. Nineteen-year-old Hamilton has big plans for his future; after he and the other cast members on stage spell out his first name, Alex tells them, “Enter me! / Don’t be shocked when your history book mentions me / I will lay down my life if it sets us free / Eventually, you’ll see my ascendancy.” Though he does note his willingness to die for the cause of the Revolution, that willingness is sandwiched between lines that elevate his own name. And Hamilton’s desire for glory and renown — for success — remains an emphasis throughout the musical, from his refusal to work as a secretary for powerful men because he believes the role beneath him, to his foolish dueling to preserve Washington’s reputation and his own, to his ascendancy to a secretarial job that apparently wasn’t beneath him — Secretary of the Treasury, with the power to push for and finally establish a national bank. His success allows him to provide handsomely for his family, but it simultaneously drives them away; he works so much that he neglects his family and friends and, while they are away on vacation, he has an affair.
It’s when his mistress’s husband discovers the affair that the lengths to which Hamilton is willing to go to preserve his own success and reputation are revealed. When this husband extorts Hamilton, asking for money to keep the affair secret, Hamilton complies. And when Hamilton’s political rivals uncover the affair and Hamilton worries that they will expose him, he plans to preserve his good name by “overwhelm[ing] them with honesty” and revealing the affair himself. Of the Reynolds Pamphlet, and of his many other writings, Hamilton says in “Hurricane”: “And when my prayers to God were met with indifference / I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance.” And in a sense, Hamilton has succeeded in delivering himself — from poverty, into a good marriage match, and into a position of political power.
But his success costs him dearly, and it is clear that these costs were not things he factored into the decisions he’s made in order to succeed. News of his affair humiliates his wife and fractures their marriage. Perhaps worse, overhearing a man insult his father’s name drives Hamilton’s son Philip to challenge the man to a duel. Philip bears his father’s image and shares his desire to elevate his own name. In “Blow Us All Away,” Philip sings, “Meet the latest graduate of King’s College! I prob’ly shouldn’t brag, but, dag, I amaze and astonish! […] Gotta be my own man, like my father, but bolder / I shoulder his legacy with pride.” Philip’s pride, so like his father’s, is foolish, and ends in self-destruction: rather than defending and elevating his father’s name, Philip dies in the duel. Hamilton’s drive to succeed, to gain fame and status, does grant him those things — but it also drives his family apart and contributes to his son’s death. This kind of success — a proud name that goes down in history but leaves a community in shambles — is hardly what we want to encourage in our students, our children, and ourselves.
Instead of success, then, let’s strive for something else — something that still enables us to do good and use our talents, but which also truly enables us to serve others. And that something else is embodied in Eliza Hamilton, who plays a smaller role in the musical compared to her famous husband — that is, until the final song, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” Eliza lives fifty years beyond her husband’s death — years she says “the Lord in his kindness” gives her — and she fills those years with service. She raises funds for the Washington Monument, preserves her husband’s writings, speaks out against slavery, and establishes the first private orphanage in New York City, where, she says, “I help to raise hundreds of children / I get to see them growing up”; in their eyes she sees her husband, himself an orphan who felt he had to help himself. Notice how, in each of these examples, Eliza uses her name, her wealth, and her influence not to elevate her own status but to lift others up — to tell Washington’s story (as he sings during this song) as well as her husband’s, to free enslaved people, to provide a home for the homeless and care for the orphan. And it’s her story of humble service, not her husband’s story of prideful success, that closes the musical.
Alexander and Eliza Hamilton’s characters in this musical give us a framework for how to think about success, and to consider if success is what we should really be after as Christians who seek to use the talents given to us by God. The musical describes Alexander Hamilton’s search for success as self-destructive, something that splinters his family and community; he is able to rebuild those relationships only by acknowledging what he has done, and only at great cost. Eliza Hamilton’s commitment to service stands in contrast to that. Like the faithful servants in the parable, she acknowledges that the long life she had after her husband’s death was a gift from the Lord, and she used it to help others first and foremost, not to elevate her own name.
Instead of seeking success, then, let’s follow Eliza’s example and seek to serve each other, to help the lowly, to give a voice to the voiceless, to care more about the welfare of others than our own wealth or status. Far from making us “worthless,” or “wicked and slothful,” our commitment to service rather than success will help us become more like not just Eliza, but more importantly like Christ.
About the Author
Dr. Julie Ooms is an Associate Professor of English at MBU, where she teaches courses in composition, world literature, and American literature. She has published articles on several different 20th century American writers, and presented conference papers on American war literature, dystopian literature, composition and rhetoric, and even comic books. Writing is, for her, first and foremost a way to communicate and forge connections between different people across time, space, and experience. In her teaching and interacting with students, she seeks to help them find connections between themselves and the writers of the past, and actively connect with others in their own right as readers, writers, and researchers.
