There's something inside of us that wants to hide whenever we experience something that we think scares us or threatens us... or might be bad for us... Call it dishonesty, call it pretense/pretending, call it acting, call it avoidance... call it distraction... We all go there... Somebody says something and we go through a really rapid little logical acrobatic move and figure out whether or not we're going to be honest and up front... or whether we're going to equivocate and hide... Or if someone accuses us of something... says we did something... and we try to figure out whether or not we'll be punished if we fess up to it. It's left over from our childhood maybe?? Or perhaps it's more ancient than that... Think of Adam and Eve... Adam says "she gave it to me... not my fault"... Eve says "the snake made me do it... not my fault"... Something in us shies away from owning responsibility for stuff...
And organizations can live this too... Right now, it's the Catholic Church on the sex abuse scandal. Interesting that the first instinct of the Church is to deny, to hide, to avoid... That's why abusive priests were passed around from parish to parish, from diocese to diocese like a box of bad chocolates. It's the first instinct... to hide, to avoid... but it gets the situation nowhere. Right now Benedict is not addressing the issue, but spokespeople are calling the accusations "gossip" and saying that the people in the pews are not being swayed by it... Really? I mean... really??
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