We had several
interesting readings today but the devotional that most caught my attention was
one entitled “Whose Rules?” (Upper
Room, 2/8/12). It began with a scripture
from Judges 21:25 (NRSV). In those days there was no king in Israel;
all the people did what was right in their own eyes. The lesson concerned rules and their creation
and the conflict that they can cause. It
is an awesome and overwhelmingly important fact that people can make their own
rules “right in their own eyes” with great determination, bravado, and a resoluteness
directly leading to action. This fact
has immense impact on human society. The
greatest difficultly is that the rules we may choose to make can have no
relation at all to reality or to important principles such as love and justice.
Obviously, rule creation can be an act
that gives an emotional high like other creativity. This practice gives a tremendous sense of effectiveness.
Who can say that we are an inferior
nation or a powerless person? Just look at
the rules made. We are assertive; we
self-confidently know what we’re about; we’ve got it all together. Such a sense of confidence and rectitude
leads directly to all sorts of tragedies.
We can defiantly make our own rules regarding drugs only to find later that
reality does not exempt us from obdurate chemical changes in the brain resulting
in additive slavery. Making rules in a
social institution such as a legislative body, we can give the illusion of decisive
action when in fact we have not addressed reality at all. The insidious pride generated from rule
making is antithetical to the humility actually required to determine “what is
so regardless of what we may say about it.”
Truth, it turns out, has a power unimpressed by our delusions
no matter how passionately held, how pompously propagated, or with what accompanying
grandeur in signification and display.
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