The Real Four-Letter Word
I’m having the same conversation over and over.
A guy told me that he doesn’t know how to deal with hardship. How can he strengthen his character?
A student asked me how to deal with the byzantine new gender codes.
A man came to me with questions about God. He felt he should already know the answers. But between a controlling family that stigmatized every pleasure as a sin and an anarchic culture that doesn’t recognize any action as wrong, he had no way to resolve his dilemma: “Does God hate me?”
Glib answers are not working for these people, representing just three conversations in one recent week.
At the base of their concerns is a missing category. It’s as if they took the elevator from their apartment on the 34th floor down into the basement. They made the unhappy discovery that they have motion sickness upstairs because their building has no foundation.
Our culture is trying to build goodness on the sand dune of personal authenticity. The guy wondering about his character knows he has to do hard things, which, by definition, aren’t among his “authentic” passions. The student asking about gender codes feels obligations to be faithful to her morality and to be loving toward those who don’t share it. Are those obligations in conflict? Being “authentic” isn’t relevant to that question.
The man who fears that God hates him has a similar conflict. He knows that God gives us obligations. Is there a way to embrace an obligation without the poison of abusive guilt-manipulation? How can he stop feeling like a whipped dog?
I can’t tell these people, “Follow your heart!” That’s merely a way to ignore their questions. They’re telling me that the questions are higher than their hearts.
In order to deal with these issues, we have to talk about what we owe. That is, we have to stand on the foundation that there’s a moral reality over us, around us, and between us. But that conversation requires us to use the only four-letter word left in our culture, the one that all polite people now refuse to pronounce. Pastors, therapists, teachers, and parents are agreed that using this word will kill your influence with others.
Duty.
