Last week the focus of the Leadership Challenge Institute program was Honesty, a topic Chemistry professor and the program's speaker, Chad Tatko, confessed he found difficult to address. In some ways, what more is there to say than "do it- be honest"? We are told to "know thyself" and be a good self. However, his talk challenged us to view honesty in a new light. He asked the group members to evaluate themselves on a scale of one to five:
Are you honest?
Are you compassionate?
Are you loving?
Ten years from now, are those numbers different?
A science professor, Chad's powerpoint included graphs and charts. According to the data, we are liars, we don't know ourselves, we don't know what we want. We are hypocrites. If you subscribe to evolutionary psychology, he said, honesty and fairness is part of our earliest mentality which serves to maintain the community and our place in it for the sake of safety in numbers, where our lack of integrity comes from our higher cognitive powers, where we rationalize what is most advantageous for us in the short term. But as Christians, we are called to speak the truth in love- how do we overcome this tendency toward dishonesty?
Do not forget who you are.
Our identity is that of children of God. Though our character is malleable and context dependent, though we do not understand what influences our moral calculus, we are given the Holy Spirit and the support of a community. As Christians, we understand honesty as a skill, not a singularity. We strive to know ourselves and to be aware of our reactors- how is my mood and environment affecting my judgement? This summer, we will be surrounded by beauty, Chad said, and it will matter- a reminder that our time in the Rockies is an opportunity to develop the character traits we engage each week. We live in this world, which is broken and beautiful in turns, but "we speak to the age to come."
No comments:
Post a Comment