Office of Communications > Weekly Reflection >April 18 , 2008

“April is the cruelest month,” Eliot tells us in The Waste Land and he wasn’t even talking about taxes.  The earth is in the pangs of labor but the ides of the month holds the greatest pain when we are reminded how much of what we earned was never really ours.

In Matthew, Peter questions the temple tax.  Jesus claims an exemption, but pays it anyway.  Of course, that’s easy when you can tell Peter to go drop a hook in the sea and the first fish he catches will have in it a coin to pay for both of them.  With my angling luck, I wouldn’t get a nibble, much less a tax voucher.

There’s  “Render unto Caesar…” but the flip side is “Render unto God the things that are God’s.”  As a friend of mine once said, if we’d ever render unto God everything that is God’s, there would be very little left over for Caesar.  And I don’t think that IRS would accept this theological accounting for an alternative minimum tax.

In ancient Greece, there was an implicit understanding of the public debt of the individual.  Liturgy was not worship, but the work the citizen contributed to the common good.  We lost something when that personal act became a personal check, but perhaps it is just as well we don’t have lawyers and librarians building a bridge across the Mississippi on weekends.  We pay our taxes instead, our financial commitment to our social contract.

I don’t mind that.  I’ve grown fond of highways and water I can drink.  But there are other things I can’t abide like subsidies for tobacco and angora goats when children have no health coverage or corporate bailouts while workers lose jobs and pensions.  So what do I do?

From the innocent unborn to those guilty of age, we have to urge a quality of life that is worthy of its dignity. We have to be a voice for the unwanted and unprotected, demanding that when the government acts in our name, it acts on our values as well. We still need that old liturgy, still have to be engaged.  Taxes are only a part of what we owe.