Moral musings and the like

This is a thorny issue that an come across as being judgemental or apathetic or just plain sitting on the fence and I’m afraid I have a feeling I’m going to fall into the latter camp. Most of my blogs are reflections on conversations with my extremely blunt and forthright friends. One of these conversations yesterday concluded with me being informed that I had flexible morals, a comment I instinctively reacted against but which made me think, is there a time and place where morals, separate from ethics, need to be flexible or is that simply me trying to justify inconsistencies?

The conversation was with one of my oldest friends who has recently graduated as a midwife. Some people close to me are currently undergoing tests in order to begin fertility treatment. Honestly I’d never really given IVF much thought and hadn’t been fully conscious of the moral issues surrounding it. In my mind I was delighted at the thought of these people I love and adore being able to have a child. In the course of the conversation she expressed surprise at my support for IVF as I had once told her I was uncomfortable with the thought of the morning after pill and she saw them as being on a par. The definition of morals on dictionary.com is ‘motivation based on ideas of right and wrong’. That definition would seem to imply that there are black and white absolutes but no shades of grey and to some extent rightly so. Are morals like a sweet shop where we can choose a pick and mix of beliefs depending on our mood, what we feel like that day and who we’re with? Or should they be a code by which we live our lives indiscriminately holding fast to a moral foundation.

I’m conscious that as a child and teenager I was brought up with a strict sense of duty and how one should behave. There were behaviours ingrained into me that I never questioned as they were the very fabric my life was composed of. The church I grew up in and the people I learned from provided me with moral guidelines that I took very seriously. To some extent, looking back, I would have been quite harsh and judgmental, both on myself and others (not that I ever did anything wrong, perfection incarnate I was!!). In recent years this has softened a lot. I realised two vital points. One, holding people up to a high standard, often a standard that is impossible to maintain, creates in them a fear of being rejected and so leads to hypocrisy and the life sucking task of keeping up appearances, never truly understanding and loving the complexity of human nature which wars and flexes internally on a constant continual basis. There is more to be said for a struggle that is ultimately triumphal than to have never struggled at all. Secondly I think there are shades of grey. Maybe this is because people I love, people close to me, have made decisions which grieved me but have forced me to look at how and why I react the way I do. There are things which will continue to grieve me but it’s my reaction to them that concerns me. Jesus condemned the sin but loved the sinner; the ones he caustically slated were the religious moralists of the day, the guardians of the rulebook. Maybe it’s more of a reflection of my walk with God but in the last year I have experienced and understood finally the temptations some people struggle with; realising my own inability to consistently rise to the standard I unconsciously set. That being said I won’t be throwing all morals away and subscribing to a permissive society which seems prevalent in the world around us.

And where do I stand on the thorny issues? The ones which have shades of grey and debate, the IVF treatment I’m excited about for a couple I know will make amazing parents, the morning after pill, abortion for a rape victim, euthanasia/assisted suicide, all these moral questions that swirl around us. I don’t know, how can I know when my knowledge is based on theory without reality. How would I react to a best friend/sister/daughter telling me she’s been raped and now pregnant and doesn’t want to keep the baby, how would I react to a family member in extreme pain wanting to end that pain, I don’t know, how can I know, I’ve never grappled and wrestled with the reality of these questions and these decisions. The One I follow was for life in its fullest and love unconditional. The practical working out of those concepts will take my whole life and I fully anticipate I’ll get it very wrong at times but all I can do is learn and keep learning, try and keep trying, love and keep loving.

As a postscript, in looking at some articles on morals online I came across the Jefferson Bible, a compilation by Thomas Jefferson of Jesus’ doctrinal truth made separate from his miracles and supernatural events. I read through it and was left with a deep sense of sadness. Jefferson removed the miracle of Jesus’ birth and the miracle of His resurrection, arguably the two main pillars on which Christianity is based. The Jesus he writes of is a moral man, a good man, but it seems that Jefferson’s intent was to strip Jesus of His divinity and in doing so strip away what made Jesus so radically different to mere moralists past and present. There have been many debates as to the true nature of Jefferson’s faith and I do appreciate what he’s doing in trying to condense the teachings of Jesus into an accessible collection which dispenses with the necessity to believe what seems to be unbelievable, but I am saddened by the thought that what Jesus said was more important than what He did and that the work of God in Him and through Him somehow takes second place.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/jeffintr.html

Postscript 2,,, have added yet another book to my booklist, ‘Ethics’ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer,