Hamlet's speech to Ophelia is a great descriptor:
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| Edwin Booth as Hamlet, c. 1870 |
(Hamlet 3.1, the famous "Get thee to a nunnery" speech)
Yep. That fits me. If my true value is going to be determined by listing all the good-stuff-I've-done alongside all the bad-stuff-I've-done, then you'll get a rather mediocre or "indifferent honest" fellow. However, dig just a little deeper into the naughty-stuff-I-really-wish-I-could-do and there are all the building blocks needed for a very base creature. Hamlet and I are arrant knaves. And I cannot stand as judge over you.
Similarly, heap together all the church's actions--at once loving and hateful, destructive and uplifting, life-saving and murderous, oppressive and freeing--and you create a crumbling aggregate of marble shards and excrement. When judged by its actions, an honest church can only stammer, "Yes, but look at all the nice things we've done, ...as well." There are times that Christian hate tears at the very flesh of Christian love; we have explicit photos, venomous quotes, and cold lists of names to prove it. Why breed more hypocritical sinners and sins, O church? Get thee to a nunnery.
And yet, does that mean any other person or body of people is somehow more pure or less hypocritical? Admitting hypocrisy doesn't make it less so. No matter who stands to criticize the other, scratch just a little into the makeup and find ridiculous irony. "Well, yeah, but compared to you..." The comparison itself is an act of misdirection and self-delusion.
A cherry looked up and, squinting, saw an apple swaying high up in the branches. The cherry thought to itself, "See how tiny that apple is!" The apple fell from the branch and landed heavily near the cherry and exclaimed, "Wow, next to you, I'm huge!" The orchard heard the apple's boast and shook her leaves in silent laughter.
Once in a great while, I think our lives and institutions accidentally intersect with the moral high road, but as soon as we lift our noses to admire the scenery, we find ourselves scrabbling down the embankment on the scree of false pride and self-promotion. We are arrant knaves, all.
Shakespeare's Hamlet let this self-awareness petrify him. On the one hand, he was motivated by justice. He hated the lies; he wanted truth rise up for air. On the other hand, this only masked his darker desire for vengeance, and he used deceit and trickery to bait that truth to the surface. And on reflection (which Hamlet does, ad nauseam) he became frozen.
What, then, shall we do "crawling between earth and heaven." There is nothing else to do but to accept and admit our own knavery, forgiving ourselves and each other, as we place our feet firmly on the earth. Then we use knees and bodies and any helping hands to leverage our heads back up into the sky. Here, people of faith have to trust God's unrelenting love and his ability to use the best and worst of all of us and whatever we've done. From there, we walk with our honest feet on the ground and our heads bobbling around in the heavens. We slip, we fall, and we help each other back up.
In the meantime, we are called to and can take stronger and preemptive stands against injustice, snobbery, and bigotry once we recognize them in ourselves. And the true victims will win when they stand, or are finally lifted up, their spirits renewed and still uncrushed by all the injustice, bigotry, devilish interpretations and applications, and pious preaching.
I'm not confident that we have found a moral high road, or have made significant progress toward the destination "Decent Humanity." Instead, these are brief and usually quiet occurrences on whichever road we happen to be. And those moments of human kindness only rise above the surface of the road when given an honest and forgiving nod that keeps and uses the best intentions and actions, and allows the dust and dirt to settle back down behind us.
