When I was a youth I read a book, “Cheaper By the Dozen” that tells the story of time and motion study and efficiency experts Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth, and their twelve children. I always thought they were on to something, at least in the sense that their must be a “calculus of child rearing.” So years later armed with an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, an MBA, and zero child rearing experience, I thought I would offer a multivariate model of child rearing that could be of aid to parents everywhere.

Rather than explain the model in its complexity, let me offer a simple example. Lets say you have three children ages nine, six, and three. Clearly you have more time and energy invested in the oldest and are hopefully realizing scales of economy and efficiency in the younger ones. But given the primary variables of time and energy as a proxy for love, the model would indicate that in deed, attitude and disposition, you should love the nine-year old three times more than the three-year old.  Similarly, you would love the six-year old twice as much as the three-year old.  As the children age that differential narrows. Consider when the children are 30, 27 and 24 respectively – you would only love the oldest year old 25% more than the youngest.  When I offered this reflection at the morning Mass, I was surprised that a number of parishioners seemed to reject the underlying model.

But is that model so foreign to us? Let me suggested that our “model,” in part or in whole, to this morning’s gospel (Matthew 20:1-21) – the Workers in the Vineyard – was exactly the same calculus. Shouldn’t the one who worked 9 hours receive three times the wage of the one who only worked three hours?

One is the calculus of the work, world, and wages. The other is the calculus of love and thus the calculus of the Kingdom. “Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last“