In England Now
Meet Mabel
[2566 words]
Let me introduce you to my friend Mabel. "Mabel" isn't her real name but my reason for calling her Mabel will become clear presently.
Mabel's not a very happy person. Not miserable, mark you, but just not very happy. Somehow there always seems to be something in her life, especially the people in her life, that "isn't quite right".
She’s a gifted person. She has a deeply incisive mind and can sniff out other people's insincerities even before they are aware of them themselves. She's also not afraid of speaking her mind; so people think twice and twice again before trying to pull the wool over Mabel's eyes. And that's where Mabel's troubles begin, if you ask me. I’m never quite "at ease" in her company because I sense that Mabel is "sizing me up and finding me wanting": falling short, as I do in many ways, of what she thinks I ought to be.
Mabel seldom voices her criticisms to the person she’s criticising, but usually to someone else. And that makes for another problem. When people hear Mabel sounding off about someone’s shortcomings they’re bound to ask themselves the question: "If Mabel says that sort of thing to me about Herbert or Tina or Jack, what does she say to them about me behind my back?"
One other curious fact about Mabel and then my sketch of her is complete:
People don't often criticise Mabel herself. For one thing, there's not a lot to criticise: Mabel is a serious, conscientious, virtuous person. But there's another reason. Any suggestion that Mabel has been at fault over something, however trivial, and she always seems to have a string of very plausible excuses ready to hand. It's as if she carries those excuses round in her pocket like a handkerchief. Something you hope you won't have to use too often, but it’s there "just in case".
Now it’s time to reveal what Mabel really is.
In fact Mabel's not a person at all, but a feature of today’s world, and of every one of us. If you rearrange the letters of Mabel's name it spells the word B-L-A-M-E or "blame".
We live in a "PC" (= Politically Correct) culture. Everything that is said or written is liable to be examined with a nit-picking fine-tooth comb to see if it could possibly be "offensive" to anybody. Often, it must be said, this examination is carried out by someone other than the potentially offended party, and regardless of whether such offence was intended or taken. The threat which PC presents to Truth (the Christian currency) by devaluing it, merits an article of its own.
Pee Cee has a sibling called Bee Cee. This article is about Bee Cee’s activities, which are even more insidious than his brother’s. "BC" stands for "Blame Culture".
Blame Culture flourishes today, thanks to the joint efforts of the political and legal professions. Both stand to gain much from the ferment which such a culture induces. With this end in mind they have conditioned you and me to believe that "When Something Goes Wrong, Somebody Must Be to Blame".
This assumption of blameworthiness has resulted in a highly-developed, widespread and well-exercised skill in blaming others. To protect ourselves, like Mabel, we have acquired a finely tuned facility for make excuses should anyone tries to blame us for our faults. Hence blame and excuses have become habitual – they have insinuated themselves so successfully into our nature that we not only practise them without thinking but after a while don't even realise that we are doing them at all.
As in war, the first casualty of Blame Culture is Truth itself. BC fits like a glove over the gilded hand of the popular misconception that "all Truth is relative" – that what was true yesterday may not be true today or tomorrow, and what is true for you may not be true for me. BC encourages people to become skilled at pinning as much blame as possible on others, whilst fine-honing their ability to invent excuses for themselves. We’ve all become, without intending to, a society of Mabels.
But, for Christian Mabels like you and me, our faith should give us two distinct advantages over the secular Mabel. One is that we know our faith, and its virtues, depend upon revealed truth – something which essentially doesn’t change with the times, unlike those secular "values" whose attraction often consists in their very novelty. Secondly we know the centrality of forgiveness in the Christian life. So we should expect our faults to be gently pointed out to us by our fellow-Christians, and, so far from bringing on a fit of excuse-sneezing, their criticism of our faults should lead us to a sense of remorse, shame and finally penitence which leads to forgiveness and the grace to overcome those faults, not least our BC.
That’s where we part company with the secular Mabels of this world. Lacking the means of grace, the hope of glory and the sense of sin which such grace bestows, they live in a world which majors on Blame: and Blame is now measured by precisely how much it’s worth – not simply to the person who has been wronged, but, more significantly, to those legal practitioners who make their living by persuading judges and juries to believe that injuries and injustices have been sustained, and the size of whose livelihood depends on how successfully they portray the magnitude of the injury and the culpability of its agent.
Where did Blame Culture come from? The popular answer is the United States – but that’s only because the most recent outbreak of this particular epidemic started there. The truth of it is that Blame Culture has been around for a very long time and originated "in the heavenlies" soon after Creation.
Legend suggests that BC began when Lucifer, the "Light-Bearer", turned from being an angel into Satan, the Accuser, and thence the Devil and "Father of Lies". He was called "The Accuser" because he got such a kick out of accusing men before God that in the end he just wanted them to be as bad as possible, and started tempting them to disobey God just so that he could have something of which to accuse them. It's an acquired taste, no doubt, but some Mabels are in danger of becoming like him too.
Blaming others becomes a habit. Do you remember what your mother said about your bad habits? "Gertrude, if you go on doing that you'll find you can't stop doing it!"? Well, mother had a point there, and hopefully Gertrude did give up that habit before it became an integral part of her nature. But in Satan's case he wouldn’t give it up. He simply went on accusing and turned into the evil creature that he has become: The Habitual Accuser par excellence.
Now it might appear that there’s a simple answer to the problem of Blame, namely "Don't blame anyone". But life's problems are seldom simple and Blame is no exception. Like other vices, blame is not evil in itself, but rather the corruption of a virtue, a virtue which we can, and should be encouraging to grow in ourselves and in others. That virtue is called Truth, and its branches have names like sincerity, honesty, openness and straightforwardness which necessarily includes charitable criticism of each other within the Body of Christ.
In February’s Rock I outlined the importance of seeing the Church as the Body of Christ. That Church, that Body of which you and I are privileged to be members (or limbs, or cells) should be the very place where each of us can speak plainly to one another, in charity, in confidence, about faults, sins and shortcomings, our faults, no less than theirs. "Speaking the truth in love" is as much a Christian activity as sharing our insights about the Faith which we believe.
It's all very well to talk about "forgiveness" once both sides involved recognize what and who needs forgiving. The first step in forgiveness is for everyone involved, sinned-against as well as sinning, to accept that there is a fault to be forgiven, and having accepted it to understand its nature and magnitude. That's precisely what every Mabel, with her pocketful of paper-tissue excuses makes so difficult. The moment she sniffs a criticism of herself the air, Mabel starts to sneeze out a cloud of excuses. If, like Mabel, we react to criticism by indignantly sneezing it away, we’re never going to recognize, let alone overcome, the less attractive truths about ourselves; worse still, our friends will stop trying to point out our faults to us, like they have with Mabel’s – understandably they don’t like being in the direct line of fire from someone who won’t stop sneezing at well-meant and probably equally well-deserved criticisms!
So how do we get our criticisms of one another across without, so to speak, bringing on a convulsive sneezing fit of excuses in the very person we’re trying to help?
The first step is to understand that we, no less than the person we’re criticising, have "sinned and come short of the glory of God". We must come to see ourselves as addressing our brother's shortcomings not like Satan does, from "up there", a position of lofty moral superiority, but from "right down here" as a fellow-sinner. So before we even open our mouth to say one word of accusation or rebuke against one of God's fellow-servants we should preface it with the prayer of the publican who said, "God be merciful to me, a sinner".
Second, we must accept that, being human, we can only have the sketchiest idea of how difficult life has been, and is being, for the person whose shortcomings we are criticising, and how far those difficulties have contributed to their having become what they are. For this we need to learn to tell the difference between an explanation and an excuse – something else about which the secular world has managed to get itself hopelessly confused..
The difference, in a nutshell is this: a genuine excuse exonerates from any blame. Blame is ruled out of court: it’s not relevant.. For example, if something is said which sounds offensive to our ears, but which was, in fact, never intended to be so, then blame should be attached, if anywhere, to ourselves for being over-sensitive.
By contrast, an explanation accepts the wrongness of what has been done or said, but helps the injured party to understand better why someone committed it. "I lost my temper because I was tired"; "I ran away because I was afraid"; "I stole the bread because my family was starving". Wrath, cowardice and theft are all wrongdoings, whatever the explanation for them; but such explanations enable us to deal more justly with those who have committed them.
Secular man confuses excuses with explanations. His attitude to every wrongdoer is, "Yes, you’ve done wrong, but there’s no doubt something traumatic in your past life which made you do it: maybe it was your parents; maybe it was poverty; maybe it was bad schooling. Whatever it was I'm not going to say anything about it but just cheerfully ignore your shortcoming". That’s like going to the doctor with a lump and the doctor glancing at it and saying "Hmm, it looks pretty bad to me, and I'm sure there's a reason why it's there; but let's forget all about it, shall we?" In the short term, that might be just what the patient would like to hear: no surgery, no pain, do nothing about it. In the long run that answer would be death, not life.
So yes, we are all sinners; and no, we don't know the whole story behind each other’s shortcomings and moral cancer – for that’s what we're talking about – something even more deadly than bodily cancer because it destroys not only the body but the soul as well. Habitually failing to deal with the moral cancers of others becomes a moral cancer in ourselves.
There is a third and very important reason why we should be concerned about other people’s moral cancers. Because we approach our erring brother or sister as a fellow sinner we may discover what "lies behind" their particular moral tumour; and we may further realise that their cancer is the one from which we once used to suffer ourselves, but by the grace of God have been enabled to overcome. So we may be more helpful to that person than someone who had never experienced or understood that particular temptation or fault.
It’s like what happens when a teacher tries to overcome a particular "mental block" in one of his pupils. Many teachers despair of getting across some elementary rule of grammar, mathematics or science to a particular child who is intelligent but has a complete "blind spot" which the teacher simply cannot understand because they’ve never experienced it themselves. They just cant "see what the problem is".
But if that teacher asks another child in the class, who used to have the same mental block but has overcome it, to help the child with the blockage, the second child may succeed where the teacher has failed. For the "unblocked" child can understand the "blocked" child’s difficulty, having experienced it themselves, in a way that the teacher (who has never experienced it) can never do.
Of course once the blockage has been removed, the teacher and children will revert to their proper role. The temporary "elevation" of the second child into the role of "teacher" will have succeeded where all else has failed. By wisely stepping aside to allow the child who has learnt to overcome the difficulty to teach another child to overcome the same difficulty, the teacher has succeeded where previously he failed.
Meeting Mabel will, I hope, have highlighted three good working practices:
First, Blame is not so much a bad thing, but the wrong way to go about helping each other towards overcoming our shortcomings. The appropriate level of blame for other people’s shortcomings, once excuses and explanations have been taken into account, is probably far less than we first supposed it to be. If we rely on our first impressions we shall only induce a fit of excuse-sneezing.
Second, keeping silence about, or turning a blind eye to, other people’s moral and spiritual cancers is not the charitable act we might like to suppose. It’s more like that doctor described earlier who allows a potentially life-threatening lump to go untreated because he doesn’t want to distress the patient by telling him the truth.
Third, God has arranged that the process of saving mankind from self-destruction should utilise those very weaknesses of which we were once most ashamed, but which by God’s grace we have overcome. Because we have experienced those shortcomings, it enables us to be particularly helpful to our fellow Christians who are wrestling with the same ones.
God is the great healer. God is the great forgiver. Let’s be in no doubt about that. But in his wisdom he wants to involve every one of us in some way in each other’s healing and forgiveness. As Blaise Pascal said "God pays us the enormous compliment of inviting us to be agents in his creation".
"Bear one another's burdens", said St Paul, "and so fulfil the law of Christ".