If it's good for you, and it's good for me ...

So, is it good for you?

Is what good?

Life in all its aspects. Your church; your neighborhood; your community; your family life. After all, when God created the world, God pronounced it good (Gn 1).

That's the divine plan: life is to be good. For everyone.

In exploring the stewardship of service, our diocese calls us to look to both scripture and Catholic social teaching to reveal central themes on ways to follow Christ. Two main themes that come up many times are community and our rights and responsibilities to serve the common good.

Last week, we looked at the dignity of persons -- all created in the image of God -- and how disciples seek to live like Jesus, the King we serve. But being "in the image of God" reveals still more about what we were created -- called -- to be. In the fifth century, St. Augustine described the Trinity as "the one that loves, and that which is loved, and love." In our time, the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls God "an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit" (n. 221).

So God is a community of loving relationship and, since humans are created to reveal the divine image, we are likewise called to live in community. We are called to loving relationships with each other that serve the common good of all.

"There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; ... to each, the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good" (1Cor 12:4).

So, as followers of Christ, baptized into the mission of revealing God to the world, we are called to serve the common good. We must always ask, "Is it good for you?" in all our relationships: not only with our friends and loved ones, but in all our contacts -- at work, in community, in our parishes and in our world.

As Vatican II said: "It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good, according to his/her own abilities and the needs of others, also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life" (GS 74).

Stewardship of the common good is a matter of justice. Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum Novarum, the church's first, great social encyclical, written in 1891, said, the common good is something "that every single citizen has the right to share in" (RN, 40). In following the Servant-King, who died for all that all might live -- so it is good for all -- we are called to do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with God (Mi 6:8).

As ethicist Leonard Weber notes, the concept of common good is not easily understood in U.S. culture, with our emphasis on indivi-dual rights and freedoms. We sometimes confuse, Weber notes, common good with "the greatest good for the greatest number of peo-ple." Rather, we should look to the U.S. Cath-olic bishops for guidance. In their 1986 ency-clical, "Economic Justice for All," they wrote that "common good demands justice for all, the protection of the human rights of all" (83).

How do we know, then, if we are serving the common good? As stewards, serving justice, how do we know that "it is good for you" in our dealings with others?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us to look for three guidelines (1906-1909):

-- Respect for each person. This might be easiest for Americans to understand, since the Catechism explains it as respect for "fundamental and inalienable rights." Vatican II said these include education, respect, privacy, and freedom of religion (GS 26).

-- The well-being and development of the group. This means that every member of the group -- all human persons -- must have access to the basic necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter and the right to have a family (GS 26).

-- Peace. In his social encyclical, "Peace on Earth," Blessed John XXIII wrote that the common good was the sole reason for the existence of any government -- and cannot be limited to the good of any one country. When we are good stewards of government and the political process, we focus on serving the common good. "(T)he common good of the State ... certainly cannot be divorced from the common good of the entire human family... Furthermore, the universal common good requires the encouragement in all nations of every kind of reciprocation between citizens and their intermediate societies" (PT 98-100).

"Is it good for you?" is the question we, as stewards of service, must be willing to ask of every human person, every group within our own society, and every society on earth.