Saints live well. Sons of bitches live well. Everyone in the middle gets slaughtered.

A simple story illustrates this. A friend of mine, we'll call him "Bosephus," had a niece who started school at Michigan State University. Bosephus's wife was talking to the girl’s mother, who was expressing the normal concerns: I hope she’s alright; she’s never been away from home. But there was no indication that the girl was having any difficulties. Bosephus’s wife told the mother, “We’ll go up and see her and take her to lunch.”

From Bosephus’s house, the drive is almost two hours. The trip, with the standard campus tour and lunch, would take a whole day. Bosephus and his wife had twin baby boys, and Bosephus, who works Monday through Friday and often on Saturday mornings, had very little time to relax or tend to the things he enjoys, like wood crafting and fishing.

Bosephus resented his wife’s offer: “My niece doesn’t care if we go or not” (which was true); “It’s a whole Sunday.” “It’s my one day to relax, now I have to spend it on the road.”

His wife called him selfish.

That sucks.

If I asked Bosephus for a favor, he’d do it in a heartbeat. But if I asked him to walk two blocks for no particular reason, he’d say no. If I needed $200.00 to buy food for my kids, or even a skateboard that my kid really wanted, he’d give it to me. If I asked him for fifty cents so I could throw it in the street, he’d say no. Is he selfish for refusing to walk two blocks for no reason or giving me fifty cents so I can have the pleasure of wasting it?

There’s a good story about St. Francis of Assisi. Shortly after he started his life of absolute poverty, he attracted followers and realized he had the makings of a new religious order. So he went to Rome and asked for an audience with Pope Innocent III. The Pope, legend says, told him to go sleep in a pig sty. Francis, being Francis, went to the pig sty and came back the next day, covered in filth.

There was no reason for Francis to sleep in a pig sty, but he didn’t care anything about himself, so he did it. It’s humility-a lack of self-regard, a concern with things other than oneself.

St. Francis wouldn’t have cared if his wife volunteered him to drive to Michigan State University for no good reason. He would’ve gone. He wouldn’t have cared if I asked him to walk two blocks down the street. He would’ve walked. If I asked for fifty cents to throw in the gutter, he’d give it to me (assuming he had it, which, of course, he wouldn’t because he never had money).

None of it would’ve bothered him. It’s a nice way to be. No matter what life-or spouse, or parents, or boss-throws at you, you accept it, do it, and move on, without further thought to the things you could be doing if it weren’t for the imposition. Indeed, the Francis-like man doesn’t even view such things as impositions; they are just things to be addressed without thought, like putting your pants on in the morning.

It’s similar to Zen. In Zen, the disciple is told to disregard his or her surroundings. A person can practice Zen in any surrounding, amid any course of events. In the words of Thomas Merton:

"What is required [by the Zen master] is not the ability to repeat some esoteric formula from a book . . . but actually to respond in a full and living manner to any ‘thing,’ a tree, a flower, a bird, or even an inanimate object, perhaps a very lowly one. Zen masters frequently took their examples from the monastery latrine, just to make sure the student should know how to ‘accept’ every aspect of ordinary life and not be blocked by the mania of dividing things into holy and unholy, noble and ignoble, valuable and valueless. When one attains to pure consciousness, everything has infinite value."

Sitting in a latrine, looking at the inside door. Or leaning against a tree looking at the Rocky Mountains. Spending the day in the car going to MSU for no good reason or casting a rod and reel in a trout stream on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The Zen master doesn’t care.

So what about those of us who haven’t attained this Francis-Zen way of thinking?

Well, we’re probably like Bosephus: Living a life of tension. There are the demands of others and there are our wishes. We want to golf; the wife wants us to stay home. We want to relax; the neighbor wants help moving some furniture. We want to work on a hobby; the local Kiwanis Club wants us to work at the Fund Booth. We want to sit on the dock of the bay like Otis Redding; our children need us to earn a living.

There’s really no way get around the tension, except to go ZenFrancis.

Unless, maybe, we opt to be sonsofbitches.

I know a guy who doesn’t give a rip what anyone thinks. He works part-time; his wife works full-time. The children spend hours in daycare when they could spend most of the day with him. If a child gets sick, his wife must make arrangements to work only part of the day and stay home with the sick child, so he can hunt, fish, or watch TV. If anyone asks a favor, he says no-with no apologies; he’s very blunt about it. But he doesn’t mean any offense. He’s his own man and you’re your own man, the way he sees it. He just wants to keep it that way, and he doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks.

I’m often envious of him. By all appearances, he has the peace of mind of ZenFrancis. His wife wouldn’t ask him to waste a day at Michigan State University, and if she did, he wouldn’t hesitate to say no. There would be about as much tension for him as there would be for me if asked whether I want to be punched in the crotch.

Of course, there’s a vast difference between ZenFrancis and Sonofabitch. ZenFrancis knows no self; Sonofabitch knows nothing but self. And because there’s such a huge difference between them, presumably one of them is better than the other.

Clearly, ZenFrancis wins, based on the Christian ideal. Everything Christ did, he did for others, including his death on the cross. Christianity is based on the ZenFrancis approach.

I realize this rationale might ring hollow with some people because they don’t necessarily want to fall back on Christian premises. Good for them. It’s good to reach a reasonable conclusion without the aid of the Bible. It’s called philosophy-reasoning without use of God’s revelation. Christians, of course, measure their philosophical conclusions against the conclusions reached by reasoning from the Bible (an academic pursuit known as theology), but it’s good to philosophize first, then come back to revelation and theology.

Unfortunately, many people these days can’t use philosophy because they don’t know where to begin. They’re so filled with Fifth Avenue commercial standards, muddled soft-headed clichés, and a relativistic attitude toward truth, that they can’t even start the reasoning process on such issues. If you ask someone on the street, “Should I be ZenFrancis or Sonofabitch?” he’d say “ZenFrancis, of course.” But if you asked him why, he’d be baffled. He’d fall back on clichés, “You can’t go through life being Sonofabitch,” or maybe democracy, “Just ask anyone,” or insults “You stupid or something?” or alleged common sense.

None of those responses are answers, of course, but he wouldn’t know how to respond because he doesn’t know the beginning point of any meaningful inquiry: Happiness.

There is, after all, only one initial question: What makes a person happy?

In order to know what makes a person happy, we need to know what a person is. If a person is pretty much just an animal-on the level of, say, a bull-then intercourse and eating make him happy, and there’s nothing more to ask. But we know, of course, that we aren’t bulls and that happiness isn’t found in such things (just ask a well-fed prostitute-or Emperors Nero or Caligula).

So what are we? Well, here we need to appeal to God: We are His creatures. That, unfortunately, requires us to prove that God exists and that He is our creator. This is a tall order. Though I believe it can be done with a fair amount of certainty, I’m not going to bother. First, the arguments are painstakingly wrapped in logic and abstract thinking and are therefore boring. Second, the vast majority of Americans believe in a benevolent Maker, so I’m going to proceed as though everyone reading this shares the assumption that He is a good God and we are His creatures. If we are His creatures, then we need to know why He created us; i.e., what are His goal for us? If we are moving in accordance with His plans for us, then we know we are moving toward happiness. A good father, after all, tries to steer his child toward happiness and away from pursuits that will make him unhappy (no matter how good it might make the boy feel, the father takes the heroin syringe from his 11-year-old son).

The first thing to see when determining whether we’re moving in accordance with His plans for us, is the existence of other things. God could’ve put each of us on a separate planet or sphere of existence. Each person to himself. But he didn’t. Far from it. In fact, the story of Genesis says that such an existence would’ve made Adam unhappy. So he put each of us in a world with others.

As a result of creation and other people, we are filled with a world of otherness. Everything is subject-object. If you love something, you (the subject) love it (the object). If you were meant to be Sonofabitch, then you’d be the only thing out there. Adam alone, without Eve, the animals, or even plants to enjoy.

Fine, you might say, but doesn’t the same thing go for ZenFrancis? By being so utterly “other directed,” so selfless, aren’t we doing the same thing, but on the flipside, in effect denying the subject and saying, “object(s) only”?

No. ZenFrancis doesn’t deny the subject (actually, Zen does-it denies the whole subject-object mentality-but that’s not relevant here). It just positions the subject in a manner that makes him capable of receiving objects. If you asked St. Francis, “Do you exist?” he would’ve thought it a bizarre question, “Of course I exist,” he’d say. If you asked him why he treats himself like he doesn’t exist, he would’ve denied that he does such a thing: “I beg for food for my body; I pray for my soul; I enjoy conversing with my companions. How can you say that I treat myself like I don’t exist?”

I realize, of course, that you could say Sonofabitch doesn’t deny objects either; he just uses them for himself, therefore he doesn’t deny the cosmological facts. This is true, but only to a limited extent. Even if he admits their existence, Sonofabitch denies that they have any importance-they’re mere fodder for his appetites-whereas ZenFrancis admits their importance, consistent with the belief that God created them and therefore must be important.

ZenFrancis is consistent with the subject-object nature of the world. Sonofabitch isn’t. ZenFrancis is on the path to happiness because he is acting in a way consistent with God’s creation. Sonofabitch isn’t. Most importantly, ZenFrancis admits God into his life. God, too, is other. For Sonofabitch, there is no room for others and therefore no room for God.

And, for this reason, I say it’s better to be like my friend Bosephus-in the tension between ZenFrancis and Sonofabitch-than Sonofabitch. ZenFrancis is the ideal; Sonofabitch is the anti-ideal. Bosephus’s tension sucks, but it’s closer to the way we’re supposed to live than the anti-ideal of Sonofabitch, and therefore more likely, at some point down the temporal or eternal road, to lead to happiness.