Thought provoker #2: Avoiding the harshness of conviction

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

I grew up in a Christian community that tended toward the fundamentalist end of the religious continuum. The emphasis of this community was on knowing “the truth” about everything and, along with that, foregrounded behaviour as evidence that one accepted “the truth” and had a relationship with God and that one was saved. The denomination I belonged to believed itself to have the ultimate truth amongst all other religions and denominations of Christianity and its mission was to convert as many to “the truth” as it could.

Of course, this focus on behaviour resulted in frequent judgments being made about others who didn’t comply with “the truth”. Ironically, the more a person constantly focuses on behaviour and aims for “perfection”, the more one must avoid looking at the flaws in oneself. Despite what may have started as an ideal aim to be perfect, it can never be achieved. And when one believes that behaviour is tied closely to salvation, and one can’t meet that standard, one would become demoralised. The answer? Distract oneself by looking and judging the behaviour of others.

I was one of those people. As I look back over my early life, I can see how judgmental I was. I criticized others for their actions, their moral choices, their mistakes and failings. It ensured I didn’t have time to look at my own flaws and fallibilities. It resulted in what Flannery O’Connor observed, that “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

When things in life go ok, and everything works out to one’s own advantage, it is easy to make judgments of others with no empathy towards the messy reality of life’s challenges and the difficulty of making ethical choices. That was me in my early years. I was dogmatic, certain I knew “the truth”, and harshly criticized others who, from my perspective, made unethical choices in their lives.

But then life happened. As I grew older, I was confronted with real pain, suffering, and the complexities of living in the real world. My life experiences placed me in situations where choices are not so easy to make, where ethical decisions couldn’t be so black and white.

There is nothing like real life experience to show the cracks and fragilities of one’s idealistic perspective on morality and the stupidity of holding to absolute truth as a standard for living a good life. It just doesn’t work. And those who persist in trying, despite their real-life experiences, usually develop into self-centred, self-righteous, judgmental, unhappy people with a surface veneer of happiness that one must protect at all costs. I know because I was there once.

Living life has constant challenges that undermine any ideal of perfection. When we honestly assess our attempts to live up to our convictions, we are forced to admit that we all fall short of those convictions. Every one of us is fallible. Life is a constant experiment that is risky, uncertain, unpredictable. And the more we know ourselves — truly know ourselves — the more we allow experience to teach us that we are no more successful at living up to our convictions than anyone else, the more harshness falls away and we, instead, understand that we cannot judge anyone else for their choices and behaviours. Harshness is replaced with empathy and compassion.

If we find ourselves harshly criticising or judging others, let’s dig back into our own life experience, look at it honestly, and remind ourselves that we are all doing the best that we can, and that we all need to give others the same latitude to be fallible as we expect for ourselves.

Go and experience life and become warm, understanding, compassionate, and forgiving of yourself — and then you’d be able to be that for others.