Catholics and Competitin- The Cherry Wars

Cherry Wars,

It’s May and aside from being the month of Mary, it is also Cherry season! You might have noticed them by now, as you speed down the highway at sixty miles per hour; small tables piled high with little sapphire orbs. I Come to a screeching halt upon seeing them, road base and dust flying up in the air! The driver behind, shakes his fist out the window at me.  I don’t care, because I love cherry season. Juicy sweet cherry season!

Her name was Tammy and during her off-duty hours from Government work, she ran several cherry tables on the weekends setting up friends and family at different corners.  I stop at one of her tables every cherry season.  Free from the constraints as a public employee, she becomes an entrepreneur on the weekends, and it fills her with the joy of Individual Liberty. She was working in the free market; she was personally responsible for either the failure or success of this business and all the folks who depended on her. Over the years we got to know each other well and I began to learn of the dark side of cherry selling. The gals who run them are territorial! Tammy tells me once she arrived at her corner only to find another woman there! She immediately pulls her truck in and kicks the leg out from her competitor’s table, cherries fly all over the highway and that’s when the fighting started. And if you have ever seen women’s mud fighting before you will get a good picture of what that looked like. Tammy, being a tough gal, wins the fight and her corner is once again hers.

Imagining this scene brings up one big fat question. Can you be a good Christian and still be Competitive? Right from the beginning  fighting started; Cain and Abel, Joseph, and his brothers. It seems that the Old Testament is filled with vicious competition. The New Testament is not much help either. In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says,  

 “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.”

While my Cheery friend, uh, I mean Cherry friend Tammy, was demonstrating enlightened self-interest, I wondered if it justified this type of behavior?  She was merely removing the competition by acting out a famous Rockefeller quote, “Competition is a sin,”  Rockefeller famously bought out all his competitors. But perhaps Tammy could have demonstrated a different entrepreneurial strategy known as Covenant Competition, where value is created for others, a win-win strategy, a mutually beneficial solution, which would have required a compromise and avoided the all-too-common dog-eat-dog world of a scarcity mindset.

Frankly, I am still unsure of the whole thing.  The bible seems to acknowledge the competitive nature of humans. Jesus acknowledges this but urges people to avoid the destructive nature of it, which sounds lovely. However, in the case of cherries, its every man for himself!