Make sure to send elevator back down

Pastoral duties have recently taken me to Belfast’s City Hospital, and to floor eleven, the highest on that impressive tower block.

When the lift eventually reaches the ground floor, the trip up is stop/start, passing the dining floor, the university floor, the administration floor, and other ten floors set aside for patients.

But with my pastoral visit completed, a long wait often ensues before an elevator reaches floor eleven. In older buildings, the wait for an elevator can be even more frustrating, if others on another floor fail to close the hatch when their trip is over.

The actor Jack Lemmon often said that he believed in “sending the elevator back down£; thinking of the needs of others, when his own trip has been completed.

Some people, when they reach the top, spare no thought for those below them.

Indeed, in political life, they have often been unscrupulous in scrambling up the greasy pole, not caring who they have trampled on while making their ascent. In Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, Brutus reflects on what he saw as Caesar’s ruthless ambition.

“Lowliness”, he wrote, “is young ambition’s ladder, where to the climber-upward turns his face: But, when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks into the clouds, scorning the base degrees, By which he did ascend” (Act 2 Scene 1).

The Bible rightly condemns those who forget the benefits they have received from others, who helped them on the way up. “Do not forsake your friend and your father’s friend” runs Proverbs 27;10.

On one occasion, Jesus healed a group of lepers who came begging to be set free from the disease. Yet when the ten were healed, only one - a despised Samaritan - returned to give thanks.

Asked Jesus, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” (Luke 17;17).Ingratitude seems part of an unchristian life-style. They forgot about the elevator.

Many of the world’s top universities owe much to long-dead benefactors, people who used their wealth to endow the institutions where they first received their education. They believed in sending the elevator back down.

The largesse of technology millionaires, like Bill Gates, is a striking modern example. Andrew Carnegie, who made a fortune in steel in the nineteenth century America, endowed libraries, not just in his native Dunfermline, but in towns and cities throughout the United Kingdom, and further afield.

He once remarked: “He who dies rich dies thus disgraced.” The preacher Alistair McClean, father of the novelist of that name, once quoted from an American tycoon, who confided to his journal: “I will say nothing as to the difficulty or ease with which one acquires money, or education, or practical wisdom, or a fine personality, but I an bound to add that whichever of them you or I may have it is fatal to keep it to yourself.”

If life has been kind to us, let’s not forget to send the elevator back down.