On this day, we have a very interesting reading from the Gospel of St. Matthew. What Jesus is teaching in this discourse is both harsh and amazing. First, he tells his disciples, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:20). When reading this passage, it is good to remember that, in the time of Jesus, the Scribes and Pharisees were known for being very religious people.

Therefore, Jesus was asking his followers to have a higher standard of behavior than even those who had standards higher than the average person. The second thing Jesus was teaching about was, in many respects, even more radical. He taught his disciples that both their behavior and their interior lives were important. Things like being angry with one’s brother or lusting in one’s heart were wrong, even if one did not act on these negative emotions.

This focus on the interior life of human beings is something that Catholic Christian leaders have taught for more than 2,000 years. In the following story by Tim Timmons, we see how one may grasp this concept in a unique way. As a result of Tim’s awareness, he turned his potentially boring job into an exciting adventure.

If you have ever gone through a tollbooth, you know that you interact with the attendant for only a moment. You hand over some money. Perhaps you get some change. You get a little ticket, and off you drive. The entire encounter takes only a few seconds at most.

A man named Tim had driven through every one of the 17 tollbooths on the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge on thousands of occasions. Never on those occasions did he have any meaningful interaction with an attendant worth remembering.

Late one day in 1984, however, he headed for San Francisco. As he drove toward one of the tollbooths, he heard loud music. It sounded, to him like a rock concert. No other cars or trucks were around with their windows open, so he wondered from where the music was coming. But when he got to the tollbooth, he was amazed to see the tollbooth operator dancing to loud music inside the booth.

Tim asked the attendant, “What are you doing?”

The attendant replied, “I’m having a party!”

“Well,” Tim asked, “where are the rest of the people?”

The attendant replied, “They weren’t invited.”

Tim had many more questions to ask, but he didn’t want to tie up traffic. Tim was intrigued with the attendant, and he thought there must be some magic in the tollbooth. So, he made it a point to find the man in the future to talk with him.

A few months later, Tim found the tollbooth operator. He was still playing loud music in his tollbooth, and he was still dancing. Tim and the man began to talk, and Tim was still curious about the man’s actions. The attendant pointed down the row of tollbooths and asked Tim, “What do those look like to you?”

“Toll booths,” replied Tim.

“No imagination!” replied the attendant. “They are vertical coffins.”

The attendant went on to explain what he meant. He said, “At 8:30 every morning, live people get into the tollbooths. They die for 8 hours, and then at 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead, they emerge and go home. For 8 hours, their brains are dead on the job. They are just going through the motions.”

Tim was amazed at the man’s philosophy of life. So, he asked, “But you are having a good time. Why is it different for you?” asked Tim.

“Well,” replied the attendant, “I’m going to be a professional dancer some day. My bosses are actually paying for my training.”

What the attendant was saying was that 16 other tollbooth attendants were dead on the job. He, on the other hand, was alive. He was having a party, while the rest were just going through the motions of life.

Jesus was reminding us that no matter what our behavior may be, we also have an interior life that is crucially important. For example, not only should we demonstrate kindness towards others, we should also love them. Love, in this context, refers to wishing the best for them.

On a practical level, our interior life affects the quality of our worldly life. Thus, it affects our physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. In other words, having a good interior life is a pro-life issue! Once we know this, we can make good choices.

Some people, for example, are easily bored with life. Others find this world very exciting; for them, there are not enough hours in the day. Some see God’s beauty everywhere and in everyone. Others see God’s creation as disordered or intrinsically evil. How we perceive the world is in the measure of our interior life. The better our interior life, the more we will be in harmony with the kind of interior disposition Jesus was asking his disciples to have.

As we continue our life journey this week, it would be a good idea to examine our own interior lives, especially as we enter the season of Lent.

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