How to Be Good

If all my good intentions had come to pass, I would have, by now and at the very least, a) provided 10 classrooms for public school children, b) taught reading to children in places like Constitution Hill, c) cooked and fed hundreds of families in a soup kitchen, d) spent the past 5 Christmasses playing Santa to the orphans in Don Bosco, e) given the RCBC Plaza valet better employment and f) made my mother very happy by calling her everyday.

I have done none of the above. The spirit was there, don't get me wrong, when I was hatching these plans. I have the NGO's contact details, the driver's resume, the flyers from UNICEF and the list of toys and candies to buy for Christmas. But for one reason or other, I have failed to follow-through. Between shopping in Rockwell and spending an hour teaching less fortunate kids, I consistently choose shopping. When it was time to act, it proved to be too much effort. And so these intentions remain thus: in my head with nothing to show for it, as shortlived as candlelight in the wind.

Intentions without action count for nothing. I might as well have been apathetic. If I am asked at St. Peter's Gate, "what have you done to make you worthy to enter Heaven," I don't think He would be pleased with "w-well... there were these plans, you see..."

I believe in the goodness of people. A serial killer, for example, may be kind to his cat. A ruthless social-climber may be sending her siblings to school. Your insufferable boss may be taking care of his ailing father. Even the blackest of hearts must have at least a tiny spark of good. It's how we are built, I think. After all, don't we call something patently evil "inhuman"? To be as we were created to be, then, is to be kind, to be good, to have a heart.

But what does being "good" mean? Clearly, it is not enough to define it as the absence of bad. There is something that requires us to do more; to step out of apathy. Is goodness generosity? Charity? Does Warren Buffet automatically become a good person because he has donated 85% of his wealth to charity? What if he was abusive to his wife, for example, or if he liked torturing animals? Will we still say he is a good man?

Is it kindness? Or patience? What if the man who has never gotten angry nor raised his voice in his life hit a cyclist, killed him and ran away? Is he still a good man?

In How To Be Good, Nick Hornby creates the character of David, the angriest-man-turned-Christian-posterboy. He became charitable, kind, patient, generous and everything your Religion teacher taught you to be. He became 100% good. In the end, you find yourself rooting for his wife to push him off the 2nd floor window. Apparently, being too good is not good at all.

But for most of us, the line between good and bad is even fuzzier. The ordinary man is neither philantrophist nor killer, he is neither cruel nor kind. He does what he thinks is good when the opportunity presents itself and does bad when he's weak. He gives food to the beggar along Gilmore St.; he intentionally wrecks someone's reputation. He is both good and bad when all he really wants is to get by.

When being good is measured by acts, and man's acts are innumerable and contradicting, is there ever such a thing as a good man?