One of the advantages of track and field as a sport is that I could tell you, at any given point in time, exactly how good I was. There are numbers still etched into my brain from track meets that took place when I was a teenager. I can tell you, to the hundredth of a second, my fastest-ever mile time, or how long it took me to run the only half marathon I’ve ever run, both fifteen years ago. The same is true, I think, for golf, where your handicap tells you exactly how you measure up.

But there is no easy way to calculate a “moral handicap,” to look at your life and know exactly how close you come to being on par for the course. You can’t measure your strength of character like you can measure the strength of your limbs. It wouldn’t make sense to say that fifteen years ago, you once prayed the rosary in 4 minutes and 36 seconds flat.

In the most important parts of our lives—in the questions of ethics and character and faith that really matter in the end—there’s no easy way to measure how good we are. And if we don’t trust that we are good enough, there’s always a temptation to prove that at least we’re better than someone else.

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