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Learning to be “God’s First”
“I die the King’s Good Servant, and God’s First.” I never fully understood the depths of this famous line from Saint Thomas More as he faced the crowd before his public execution — even after over a decade of Catholic education and a few years of my own practice as a young lawyer. The Good Counselor Project Fellowship changed that. I can spend much time happily discussing what I’ve learned about our cherished Western tradition and literature — and how that applies to a young, Catholic, American lawyer’s profession in our age. But the most significant, even life-changing, core lesson I’ve taken to heart in my young career is how to be “God’s First.”
Like a lot of my colleagues and fellows, I do not come from a family of lawyers. All through my life, I’ve seen the profession as a conduit to a potential career where I can affect change in my life and my community informed by the values I hold dear: everyone is created by God, we are free to worship Him as we desire, and we have a right to live our lives in the way He wills us to live. In short — and as the Jesuits from my formative years always taught me — I wanted to (I needed to) dedicate my life and career to the glory of God. “Magis.” To do more for Him.
My college and law school years tempered, and sometimes distracted from, those expectations. I soon realized that, while some lawyers go on to do the very things that I wanted to do, a vast majority of attorneys use the profession primarily to make a living for themselves and their loved ones. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Soon, the reality of 21st century living kicked in. The reality of student loans. The reality that, for a lot of new lawyers, a stint in private practice was inescapable — even required — to obtain the experience needed for their later careers. The reality that the day-to-day life of a junior associate is largely confined to endless brief writing, document review, attending meetings and conferences, and writing emails on Outlook for often faceless clients and organizations in corporate America.
I’ve tried to rationalize the importance of my job — as both a Christian and as someone who longed to “do more.” And while I’ve grown in my faith these past few years, it wasn’t until the Good Counselor Project Fellowship opened its doors to me that I’ve realized that I am where I’m supposed to be.
One of the main themes of my fellowship year was that lawyers are critical to the thriving of our civilization. The American legal system is founded on a long tradition of law and philosophy and is deeply informed by natural rights. It is the product of the centuries-long discussion, debate, and deliberation about which rights men have, how we ought to live out those freedoms in our communities, and how our desires and responsibilities as human beings inform our relationship with our families, our neighbors, and God Himself. Christian lawyers in particular have a very unique position because we live in a society governed by modern law, yet we know that this same legal system we operate in is a fruit of God, the greatest lawgiver of them all.
The fellowship constantly reminded me of this tension as we went through the program. We started with readings from the Iliad and Antigone, both pre-Christan works dealing with how the ancients contemplated duty and honor — and how those values influenced one to fulfill his desires and responsibilities to himself, his family, and his community. Similar strands of discussion were seen when we read through Cicero’s On Duties. And finally, the fellows and I devoured (with the vital help of Dr. Daniel Burns) Dante’s Inferno with its narrative of the author’s journey through the Nine Circles of Hell. Dante illustrates how human desire can be deformed and lead people away from God and their very own human nature created in His image and likeness. The fellowship also provided me the opportunity to digest Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae through an extensive discussion on what the law is, what it ought to be, and how it should affect and influence the promulgation of the common good.
The fellowship provided me with much-needed intellectual discussions of how our civilization developed its law and my role in its maintenance. I realized that even a young lawyer in the beginning of his career has a big role to play in this. And that role is to be “God’s First” in whatever I do in whatever legal practice I am engaged in.
Being “God’s First” means that I strive to apply our long-cherished Western, Christian values in the work that I do every day. I ought to produce great work product for my partners and clients, not for my own personal glory nor for the glory of my firm or my team, but because I am doing something that in itself is meaningful since I am doing it — God created me in His image, in His likeness, and whatever I do has meaning because of Him. And while I (and most Christian lawyers) live and operate in a culture that is seemingly forgetting its first principles, I now know that being “God’s First” also requires me to live my life according to His will and what He wants me to do, despite the pressures and temptations of everyday life.
This was perhaps the greatest lesson I learned. During our final retreat, a speaker advised us to find God and His will in the four corners of our offices. At that point, I was unsurprised by this thoughtful suggestion. The year-long fellowship taught me that my work had meaning, that I had boundless opportunities to live out God’s will in my life even as a private attorney, and that my actions, my words, and my conduct reflect on me and my faith. I now celebrate the fact that God is with us, even when conducting document review, even when writing an email on Outlook. I just needed to realize He was there all along, especially given my role as a lawyer bound by the very law informed by His works and His words.
Pope Saint John Paul II said that freedom “consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” The Good Counselor Project Fellowship helped me realize what I ought to do as a young attorney. True, I dream that I can develop as an older lawyer in the future and help directly defend and maintain our natural rights as human beings and the natural law on which our societies were founded. Nevertheless, today I have a much fuller sense of my job as a Catholic lawyer at this stage in my life. What I ought to do is to constantly and forever place God at the center of my work, see Him in my life, and be a blessing to my colleagues, supervisors, friends, and family. While I (thankfully) may never be provided the dilemma that Saint Thomas More was faced with — whether to choose loyalty to God or loyalty to his cherished friend King Henry VIII on the pain of death — like him I can, and will, work towards being “God’s First” in my own way.