On Varying Levels of Wrongness

I think that in some senses, all wrong acts need to be seen as the same. When we attach differing weights of severity to different deeds, we end up making different classes of morality. For example, a pedophile is seen as more morally deplorable than a man who cheats on his wife is. I’ll admit that I think this way all the time; however, I believe that this frame of thinking blocks a relationship with God.

The most fundamental step in Christianity is to recognize how flawed you truly are, and then to turn to God as a response to that awareness. But what if I believe in my heart that I’m not as flawed as others are? For example, say that I am a chronic liar, but that my neighbour cheats on his wife. If I start thinking that infidelity is a more detestable act that lying is, then I will soon begin to think that my neighbour is a more detestable person than I am. Thus, if I only see myself as half as flawed as my neighbour, then I’m probably only going to turn to God with half of my heart, if at all.

Examples of this type of thinking can be found all over the New Testament. Who were a lot of the people that responded to Jesus? Quite a few of them were prostitutes and tax collectors; people seen as the moral bottom-feeders of their society. They knew how flawed they were. And who were the ones who most vehemently opposed Jesus and everything that he was teaching? They were religious leaders; people who probably saw themselves as sitting atop the pyramid in the moral hierarchy. They had trouble believing that they were flawed, because they saw themselves as better than everyone else. Since they didn’t see themselves as being equally vile as the prostitutes and tax collectors, the religious leaders implicitly were saying that they didn’t need as much forgiveness as the prostitutes and tax collectors did.

So where am I going with all of this? I think that creating relative levels of wrongness for certain acts and behaviours will separate me from God. In fact, I don’t honestly think that I can call myself a Christian unless I can look into the eyes of a murderer, a rapist, or a pedophile and sincerely believe in the bottom of my heart that I am just as repulsive as he or she is.

Not in My Hands

I am a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. At any moment, I could suffer a critical aneurism, or be spontaneously struck by a deadly stroke. I will eventually die, and that death could conceivably arrive at any moment. So why am I not apprehensive? Why do I frequently fall asleep at night without worrying about whether or not I will awaken in the morning? I believe that I am free from a debilitating state of worry because I’m not in control. If my body is hard-wired to die at the age of 24, there’s not really a lot that I can do to change that (healthy living and advances in modern medicine aside). I’ve accepted that I’m not in complete control, and because of that, I’ve found freedom; freedom from anxiety. I recognize that the inevitability of my death is far beyond my locus of control, and as a result, I’m at peace with the whole situation.

What I’ve outlined above is one of my favourite things about believing in God: an indescribable sense of peace at the very pit of my soul. For some odd reason, my natural tendency is to believe that so much of my life is contingent upon me single-handedly manufacturing a string of superlative performances. More than just feeling the need to be successful, I’m also inclined to believe that those successes, my very fate, can only be achieved by the work of my own hands. And that sentiment burdens me heavily with a large amount of anxiety – it’s a lot for one man to bear.

But I believe that I am a created being. Consequently, I’m not capable of rising above what I’ve been designed to be. As a result, I’ve found such a sense of peace. I no longer feel as much pressure to be something that I’m not, because I’ve recognized that, to the largest extent, I can’t control that.

I’m not trying to promote the concept of pre-destination, or an apathetic style of living. There are a lot of things in my life that require a conscious effort on my part, and I make my own choices and decisions everyday. What I am saying, however, is that the answers to the big questions like, “Who am I?” are not in my hands. And because I recognize that I’m not in control of that, I feel free to live.

Despicable Desensitization

I can still recall with undistorted clarity my first brush with mortality. I was five years old and watching the television show Rescue 9-11. If you don’t remember the series, the premise focused on outrageous tales of perilous situations that everyday citizens found themselves in. The great part was that despite every danger encountered, the individuals in the show always managed to survive. That is, until this one episode. In this program, a mother gave birth prematurely, and the remainder of the show centred on her child’s struggle to survive in the neo-natal care unit of the hospital. I remember waiting on edge of my seat as if I were watching an episode of Batman, eagerly waiting to see how the day would be saved this time. Suddenly, the tone of the narrator descended several octaves as he remorsefully explained that this newborn baby did not survive the few days following his birth. I was taken aback. I simply didn’t understand why this child didn’t even get a chance to live. It didn’t seem fair to me. And it made me cry.

In the eighteen years since this experience, I have been overloaded with information about a myriad of equally as tragic travesties. I’ve been exposed to newsflashes of ethnic cleansings, student shootings, mass starvations, and individuals so consumed with hatred that they’re willing to sacrifice their own lives to hurt people they’ve never met. The presence of pain has become so common to me that I have become desensitized to it all. If I reacted to every story of suffering in the same manner as I did when I was five, I would never get out of bed in the morning. Thus, to cope, I think that I’ve learned to only allow my heart to feel sorrow when a tragedy affects me on a personal level. If the bad news does not somehow alter my life, I’ve somehow over the years habituated the tendency to tune it out and forget it. And I hate that.

I really do wish that I could reclaim my five-year old empathetic heart; that seeing the pain of a complete stranger on a television screen could move me to tears. I don’t really know how to go about doing that, but I really do believe that that little five-year old boy, compared to the man who looks me back in the mirror today, is a much closer representation of what I was intended to be.