If you have followed the traditional mass media for the last ten days or so you’d be forgiven for believing that the world had stopped with the death of Queen Elizabeth and that nothing else was happening. Although the passing of the longest-reigning monarch was arguably a huge event of historical and cultural significance, the world keeps turning and people around it have to face their daily challenges and troubles. How we deal with those challenges depends on our internal set of values – often called a moral compass – and circumstances that can really test those values. Our moral compass isn’t something that develops on its own. From the day of our birth, it has been shaped and formed by our upbringing, education, social interactions, culture, religion and many other factors that escape our attention. A crucial part of such a process is played by challenging, questioning or confronting undesirable attitudes or behaviour.
At a recent quasi-ecumenical service I listened to an interfaith minister who was presenting their “theology”. It consisted of a rather New-Age-y pick-and-mix of various religions. It offered a nebulous spirituality with no distinctive rules or moral code. “Whoever you are, whatever you do we accept you and we do not judge you” was the slogan used to attract people. It’s all jolly good on the face of it but it can only work for people who have already been morally and socially well formed. It’s based on the assumption that everyone is inherently good. It’s a nice idealistic thought but the reality is far more complicated. I used to work in a youth detention centre as a chaplain and experienced first-hand how ill-formed people could be. Those young inmates genuinely believed that their crimes had not been evil; in their minds, they were unjustly locked up although they had committed serious crimes, such as murder, assault, rape and so on. Sadly, human nature is prone to selfishness and without an effort to keep that in check it can lead to nasty attitudes and antisocial behaviours. It seems that the “rules don’t apply to me” sentiment is on the rise as we tend to set our own individualistic standards. It’s just selfishness disguised as “personal freedom”, devoid of personal responsibility.
By definition, we humans always want to do good and avoid evil. When we do the latter, it’s either because we believe it’s good – as in the case of my aforementioned young criminals – or because we convince ourselves that it is good, or at least a lesser evil. We are very good at finding excuses to justify ourselves. We create a positive spin on our actions (“it’s for your own good”) or blame others for our retaliatory actions (“you started first”) and so on. Our creativity in that respect is infinite. That’s why we need external confrontation and challenge of our attitudes, habits, behaviour and actions. Religion-based moral code can be very useful for such a purpose when it’s taken seriously. The latter phrase is crucial because it seems that too often we accept religion as a source of rituals and traditions but we dismiss its moral code, thus preventing it from penetrating our moral compass. We superficially accept the commandments and even take pride in the high evangelical ethics, but in everyday life we easily justify moral compromises or downright breaches. “I steal from my employer because I’m not paid enough”. “I cheat my clients because of this or that…” Such small dishonesties seem to be innocent and inconsequential. Well, let’s listen once again to today’s gospel:
“The man who can be trusted in little things can be trusted in great; the man who is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in great.” All those huge scandals, incidents of corruption or of crime that we hear and read about started some time earlier when people got away with much smaller misdemeanours or misdeeds. Then the boundaries were pushed further and further while a sense of impunity grew to the point of committing serious crimes. The various scandals that have shaken up the Church terribly in the last twenty years, and go several decades back, all started with tiny personal breaches of discipline and moral code. The same applies to any form of abuse and exploitation in the past – like slavery – and in the present – like paying just wages or providing decent services and so on. In a wider sense, the first reading’s warning given by the prophet to the exploitative and dishonest merchants remains applicable to each one of us as employers, employees and – most importantly – as fellow human beings. If we take our faith seriously, we must expose ourselves to “the word of God [that] is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12) We must be ready to be confronted with the demands, obligations and stipulations of the Gospel and correct our attitudes, behaviours or actions accordingly if and when necessary. Otherwise, our religious devotions, pieties, rituals and traditions will only serve as delusional self-deception but are of no use to anybody. Make yourself trusted in small things and greater things will come your way.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay