More than a decade ago volunteers from First Christian Church repaired the beautiful stained-glass window of Bethel AME Church. They made a new frame and purchased new stained glass. As the final piece was being wedged into the new frame, a crack appeared.
The issue is how to interpret that unfortunate event. Did the glass break, or did the volunteer break it? The volunteer was quick to blame himself and accept the burden of guilt. He said, ‘I broke it!’ One of his co-volunteers said, ‘It just broke!’
I remember a story my elder brother told as a sermon illustration. He taught me to drive his car when I was about twelve years old. We drove around a huge empty sports parking lot. The car was pre-automatic transmission, so the clutch and gas had to be coordinated carefully. The motor died. He said, ‘You killed it!’ I responded: ‘When it happens to me, why do you say, ‘You killed it,’ but when it happens to you, you say, ‘It died?’
Back to the Bethel AME Church stained glass and the issue of the blame game that came into play. The volunteer blamed himself and used the personal pronoun ‘I’ in assigning guilt. His colleague responded an impersonal pronoun in ‘It broke’ to erase blame and guilt. That permitted the conversation to refocus from past fault to how to respond. Should they purchase a new piece of glass and install it, or leave the crack in the window? Check the Bethel AME window to discover what they decided.
These stories highlight the importance of being careful in word use when referring to unfortunate events. Do you use personal pronouns for yourself (I, me, we) to accept responsibility? Or do you use objectified personal pronouns (they, those, them) to blame others? Or do you use an impersonal pronoun (it) to identify an accidental occurrence?
We are caught in a moral quandary. A moral imperative is the drive toward a more perfect ‘ought’ amidst the imperfect ‘is’ of our current circumstance. We should be better, but we can never be perfect. We are finite, and everything around us is imperfect. While self-awareness and a healthy conscience are admirable, guilt and blame are not beneficial for personal or group well-being. Repentance requires a change of direction, not dwelling on past wrongdoing. Pointing a finger of blame at others is counterproductive for everyone.
On occasion it is wise to accept imperfections. We purchased a beautiful Lane coffee table before we moved to Crawfordsville. A couple of months later our baby son pulled himself across the table, and his zipper left a deep scratch across the top. Sixty years later that scratch reminds us that our home is to be lived it; it is not a museum. But that insight is never an excuse to live amidst filth — physical or moral.
It is wrong to say that evil is a normal occurrence and that the mistakes and the bad things we and others do is ‘just the way the cooky crumbles.’ That attitude cuts the nerve of moral judgment and action. For example, some people take the biblical statement, ‘The poor you always have with you’ (Mattew 26:11) as an excuse for resignation and inaction rather than as a call for redemptive responses.
The point of this column is to urge us all to avoid dwelling on either blame as in ‘I did it’, or ‘they did it’, or on fate as in ‘it just happened.’ Let us work together with hope, compassion, and unity to fix what’s wrong and make everything better for me, them, it, and all of us.
Raymond Brady Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
