How
do you avoid hypocrisy in your life? (Serendipity Bible 10th
Anniversary Edition, pp 1404-5).
At
the outset to avoid an insufferable degree of hypocrisy, I must
immediately revise the above question to: How do you seek to
minimize hypocrisy in your life? Of course the question that
confronts me is the basic problem of eliminating from consideration
those areas of restraint due to common courtesy. Though I am most
assured my ass stinks most of the time, I do not feel constrained to
constantly introduce this up as a subject for consideration—this is
neither a prepossessing visual nor odoriferous bouquet that I need
verbally elicit within the neurological senses of my
associates—mainly based on the Golden Rule. It is an invasion of
privacy—not of mine, but theirs.
But
this gracious loophole in truth-telling brings with it many problems.
If we are willing to cover up truth in one area, where exactly does
the rectitude of such a practice become instead abject hypocrisy?
There is no end to the rationalizations that I can produce on the
instant in the name of not offending others. This can open a
veritable floodgate of outright prevarication, phoniness, and
hypocrisy aimed not at saving others from hurt, but myself. To put
it another way, I always seem to have the sniffles so it is a
continual area of anxiety to determine if I have a mild allergy or a
serious cold—if I am being merely polite or grossly dishonest.
Let
me give an example of this twilight zone. Frequently timing matters.
Say, I want to take the afternoon off from work—it is uppermost in
my mind to ask my boss to get off. But I cloak my desire first thing
in the morning when I see my boss is preoccupied in some important
matter. “Now is not the time to broach the question,” I tell
myself. I will pretend that I intend to work all day and will pop
the question of getting off at a more opportune moment. Thus, I
become a designing hypocrite while cloaking it all in a reliable
rationale of timing.
Hypocrisy
and manipulation are frequent companions. And the devil allows me
ample rope to hang myself for certainly I am just being considerate
of my boss, not Iago-like manipulating him. An inordinate drive of
self-righteousness is aided and abetted by thoroughgoing
self-interest. Only God's grace can redeem me from heaping upon
myself self-congratulatory kudos for my skills in being wisely
politic and remarkably judicious in human affairs when in
fact I'm just being a self-serving hypocrite.
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