Right and Wrong

Is it a sin to overeat? she asks me.
I think it is. Our bodies are "bought with a price" and we are told to honor God in our bodies.
What about telling white lies as a way to avoid hurting someone's feelings? Is that wrong?
I look at Briana's upturned face, intensity burning in her eyes. Is there a perfect answer? I hedge. Well, providing appropriate information for children, for example, is often preferable to absolute honesty about things they don't need to hear or know.
Oh. I hadn't thought about that.

I'm thrilled that Briana is asking these sorts of questions. I want her to think about right and wrong, about good choices and the ethics of living in a less-than-neatly-packaged world. She seems temporarily satisfied and quickly flits off into reveries about a Gray's Anatomy character.
Here today, gone tomorrow.
I smile to myself.

I think back to the early days of graduate school. Some of my questions about ethics in complicated human dilemmas at Bible study had been met with more than a frown and slap on the wrist. I had been told by well-meaning but rigidly entrenched, conservative religionists, that if I kept studying counseling I would lose my way spiritually. Pretty soon I'd be on the slippery slope to perdition--a humanist agnostic whose postmodernist leanings had made me so deconstruct the notion of God that I had become morally and spiritually destitute in a relativist world. What a picture!
No, they reasoned--you must learn how to use the Bible in therapy and encourage people to become baptized Christians. Otherwise, your work is worthless. Worthless! (Wonder what they think about doctors who don't pray with their patients!) But they were so glad that I asked about these issues so they could set me straight.

It is anxiety that makes people talk like that. Fear that differentness, a kind that they don't understand, is somehow the enemy. Concern that another way to view life is incompatible with faith in, and love of, God. That if the skills of science and the human mind are called into practice, that God as Ultimate Healer has been set aside. So they denigrate and discourage. This is somehow acceptable, but my way of working with human relationships so people can view God as loving, warm, always faithful--this isn't a good thing.

This makes me chuckle now, although in the early days it caused marked consternation. We are only as important and powerful as our enemies. Some railing and upset is like a feather in the cap, apparently.

I may have written about this before in this blog, but I am thinking about this again and it bears repeating. We all have a list of life issues that we feel are either odious to God or absolutely morally unacceptable. Non-negotiables. There are people who become quite exercised over things like returning tithe to God, or eating certain kinds of foods (or not), or divorce, or the politics of morality in this country. But while these folks focus on these issues, they privilege other issues or behaviors that are oftentimes much worse than what they are lobbying against. In the end, what does that say about us as humans? We try to be clear about what is right and wrong, try to live by those ideals, and yet while we are looking at the "mote" in our brother's eye, our heads are obscured by boulders we can't see around.

There is a movie that speaks to this: Priest. I haven't seen it for several years, but it is a movie that had a profound impact on me. It is the story of society's privileging of issues. Very moving and a must-see for those who are interested in seeing a thought-provoking movie.

More and more I see that we all embrace sin in one form or another. We can't not do it. "For with my mind I serve God and in my flesh, the lusts of the flesh." (Romans 7). We are cut from the cloth of imperfect humanity. As such, it is difficult to see with clear vision how God sees us and this world.
I am so grateful that he is the judge in the final analysis.