It is striking just how tenacious we as human beings are in avoiding the acceptance of fault on our side. We often believe of ourselves and others that admitting flaws and faults and shortcomings will disqualify us from being models of proper behavior or people worthy of respect. Even those who are the most hostile to the need to obey the laws of God and man act as if dignity and human worth must be earned. Rather, they are ours by inheritance from being born as human beings, but like all gifts they come with responsibilities. Nonetheless, the belief that we must earn our dignity and worth leads to all kinds of serious problems both in how we see ourselves as worthy of respect and how we judge others.

A belief that dignity and worth must be earned gives serious problems to our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of others. Our knowledge of the flaws and shortcomings of others, when it is combined with the wrong view of honor and respect (requiring it to be earned by actions rather than being a basic way of treating other people), often leads us to act in contempt and hostility and disrespect toward everyone. And this sort of behavior certainly does not make us worthy of respect, if we had to earn it. All too often we believe we have earned respect from others (based on our own subjective standards of our self-worth) but believe that others have fallen short of the standard by which they are worthy of respect by virtue of their own imperfections. And that leads us to be unjust and overly harsh judges of others, for what we judge others for we commit ourselves.

And that causes harm to ourselves as well. For a belief that respect and honor must be earned rather than being our normal habit of behavior (unless someone proves themselves unworthy of it, which is far more just than making someone prove their worthiness of it) also forces us either to ignore our own faults or to deliberately deny them to either consider ourselves or promote ourselves as being worthy of honor and respect by our own standards and those of others. Either we must consider our faults and shortcomings as minor and natural and therefore not worthy of reducing our respect or we must be hypocritical in feigning a virtue and noble character that we do not possess. And this makes a mockery of our standards for virtue in the first place.

In addition, when we do err in a way that we cannot hide or deny, we seek by any means possible to deny responsibility for the fault. We blame circumstances, or blame our background, or curse the stars and planets that were in the skies over our heads when we were born. We will curse our parents or teachers or former ministers or government leaders, or throw our friends under the bus, anything to escape the blame for ourselves. Because to accept serious blame is to remove from us in our own minds the worth for love and honor and respect that we so dearly crave and need. But even though the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves, we need not despair of being unworthy of honor and love simply because we are flawed human beings like everyone else.

Once we are set free from the unrealistic expectation that worth and respect and honor and love must be earned, but that they are given freely by the unworthy to the unworthy (for God alone is worthy), we are free to grow, to learn, and to cease pretending to be what we are not. We are free to own up to our mistakes, to learn from them, and to grow and improve ourselves without the fear of having to pretend to a level of perfection that we do not have. This freedom does not come without a price. Indeed, the knowledge of our shortcomings is something that the wicked and evil will try to use against us in attempts to blackmail us (I have had this happen to me, for example), but so long as we remain strong and sincere and open to the truth, we will be able to rise above the slanders in the eyes of those who truly matter. Of course, many people ultimately will show themselves not to matter anyway, but unfortunately the price for living in sincerity and truth means finding out who among your friends and family can handle the sincere truth about you and themselves.

All too often we think that the perfection that we desire is a perfection that is an absence of flaws or shortcomings, but in reality it is a maturity where we practice and grow through our experiences, some happy and some sad, some wise and some foolish, and reach a level of maturity as a result of having lived well. With that maturity we can then see the purpose of our lives and of their tangled and complicated twists and turns, without rancor or hostility, knowing that even what was bad and unpleasant about our lives has worked out for the good according to God’s divine providence. I hope that I can reach such a mature state myself, the way I feel I behave in my better moments, hoping those moments can be more common and in more adverse circumstances, and not only on my best days.

If we are to develop our character in healthy ways we must be honest about what we do well, what gifts and talents we have from God, and what we do poorly by God’s standards (and not by our own subjective ones). We must also be merciful to ourselves and others, in the knowledge that our aim is not a sterile perfection that is without errors but rather a maturity that is wise beyond one’s years, full of deep compassion and understanding for others, and also one that is continually striving to reach greater depths of understanding and application of God’s ways, where our good character is not an act that we play or a facade that we put over ourselves to hide our flaws, but springs from having God’s laws and ways written in our hearts and minds and part of the fabric of our lives. May we be fortunate to reach that blessed state.