A Blessed Little Thought

... hopefully containing much pith.

My homiletics professor in seminary called the kinds of short, single-point message that I have been publishing in this newsletter “Blessed Little Thoughts,” or “BLTs”. Such messages should be a staple in a place where the clergy are called upon to say something about the scriptures or the life of the church, or the saints, or something every day, as I was in parish ministry. BLTs should be pithy (“containing much pith,” or… “concise and forcefully expressive”). But, of course, sometimes a try at a BLT is neither concise nor rich in pith. And there’s a real danger that when you aim for pithy you end up with jejune: “naive, simplistic, and superficial,” especially if what you are aiming for is encouragement.

What to say at an hour when choosing sides is in the air on all sides? Politics at home and abroad seem to demand something of us. And since there is much at stake, both at home and abroad, there would seem to be a risk that dithering will come at a cost to someone, somewhere. Dithering seldom pays off, and is not to be encouraged.

So, how to reach a moral judgment when such a thing is called for: when called to arms, say, or when simply called to take a stand. I’m reminded of the (pithy) observation that where you stand depends on where you sit, which is to say that we are, all of us, conditioned by our personal experience, and most especially by the circumstances in which we find ourselves in the moment; it’s exceedingly hard to divorce our judgments from our experience.

I find myself returning over and over again to two principles in the way I make moral judgements, and a third was recently introduced to me, that I think bears mention here too.

First, relationships are usually more important than ideology. Again and again, soldiers in combat recount that it’s the soldier beside them that matters more than anything else, that they find themselves fighting as much for one another as for any cause. War may or may not be just, but most of us don’t get to decide that, most of us just have to decide whom to shield, whom to protect, whom to fight for. Or, think about how many people’s attitudes about sexuality and gender have been shaped primarily by the relationships they are in, and how much better the outcomes are when our attitudes are shaped this way.

Second, demands for any kind of purity - ideological, religious, political, sexual, ritual - never lead anywhere good. Where leaders demand purity, trouble is sure to follow; we know this in part from our own national origin story. Religion is particularly susceptible to puritanical pitfalls, even though it has never done religion any good whatsoever. When political forces start to promote purity of any kind, we should be on our guard. Politics ought to be practical, not pure. Avoid demands for purity.

The third principle was articulated to me by a close friend in recent months, and it has come to seem very important to me. When something goes wrong, look for the flaw in the system before you look for the flaw in the individual. Chances are that the individual is doing his or her best, but defective systems result in bad outcomes for everyone. So often, we have somehow learned to trust the system, and when the system is working, often it makes sense to do so. But when something goes awry, even if there may be some fault that can rightly be attached to an individual, often the system has been complicit in allowing for that fault. To be sure there are times when someone acting in bad faith can cause a lot of damage; that’s when we need to apply wisdom to know the difference between a flawed individual and a flawed system.

These three principles are not intended to teach you how to decide to vote, or how to choose a side to support in the Middle East wars going on right now. These principles are intended to help you be a person capable of making moral judgements, and to have practice arriving at good moral judgments as you consider your relationships, examine demands for purity, and assess the potential flaws in a system before assessing the individual. Like so much else, we need to practice making smaller moral judgments using criteria like these, so that we’ll be better able to survey the landscape of bigger moral questions and reach sound decisions, which may need to be reevaluated down the line in any case.

I’m not an ethicist or a philosopher, but I have walked with a lot of people through a lot of hard moral issues, and I’ve encountered more than a few myself. Is my outlook situational? Perhaps it is; I think I can live with that. I think Jesus demonstrated an inclination toward situational ethics more than once. I know I have made mistakes, but the mistakes are ones I can live with because they have mostly tried to take into account my relationships, the fruitlessness of the demand for purity, and to examine a system for defects before assuming that the people inside that system are defective.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a picture taken this morning. Today was a beautiful, warm fall day. Felix and Kermit and I enjoyed a long walk through part of the Wissahickon Valley Park where we were untroubled by any moral decisions at all.