A little less than 20 years ago, we took a family vacation in Tennessee. We rented a house in Knoxville for a week.
One evening after putting the youngest two in bed, and while my two oldest – who were 13 and 15 at the time – were downstairs playing pool, my wife and I finally had a quiet moment to relax.
Just as I put my feet up, we heard a crash of glass from downstairs. When we ran down, we saw that the glass top end table was shattered. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that a pool ball was hit off the table, landed on the table, breaking the glass.
We asked my kids what had happened. They both stared blankly at us and said nothing. How did the glass break, I asked again. They both looked their mother and I right in the eyes and said, “I don’t know.”
I said a bit more sternly, “Just tell me what happened.”
My daughter said, “We were playing pool, and it just shattered.”
“Did something hit it,” I asked.
“No, it just shattered.”
“So you’re telling me that the glass top of that end table just spontaneously shattered?”
They both nodded. “Yup.” And they stuck to their story (until their mid-twenties!), taking absolutely no accountability for their actions.
Psychologists say that people fail to take accountability for their actions for reasons ranging from simple laziness and fear, to a sense of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of a situation.
Of course, this lack of accountability is nothing new. In fact, the phenomena can be traced back to our first parents.
After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree, the Lord God called to the man and asked, “Where are you?” Adam answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.”
“Who told you that you were naked?” God asked. “You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!”
Look at what Adam says, “The woman whom you put here with me – she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.”
Adam doesn’t say “Lord, forgive me for disobeying you.” No. He blames the woman! He takes no accountability for his actions. Even worse, he deflects any responsibility on his part and throws it on God: “The woman whom YOU put here with me.” The logic is that if God didn’t put the woman there, Adam would have never eaten the forbidden fruit, so it must be God’s fault.
The Lord God then asked the woman, “Why did you do such a thing?”
And what’s her answer? “Lord, forgive me. I ate the fruit in a moment of personal weakness?” No! The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” In other words, it’s not my fault God, the devil made me do it.
How often have we found ourselves in the same situation: I’m sorry God, but … I’m sorry God, but I had a bad day at work. I’m sorry God, but I really needed that A on the important test. I’m sorry God, but if you hadn’t put me in that situation. I’m sorry God, but did you hear what they said?
Saint Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and also the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons.” We cannot have one foot in our Catholic life and the other in a life that does not reconcile with what Jesus has taught us to do and our professed beliefs.
Lacking accountability for our actions does just that, straddling the thin line between self-reproach and self-deception.
Saint Francis de Sales said, “It is not those who commit the least faults who are the most holy, but those who have the greatest courage.”
It often takes courage for us to admit our weaknesses and faults. It takes courage to utter words of things we’ve done because we attach to our words a sense of self, and we don’t want to define ourselves in terms of serial sinners.
Fortunately, we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In the confessional, there needs to be no holds barred. The words we speak there will then define us in terms not of sin but of freedom. When in doubt, confess it out.
Pope Saint John Paul II reminded us, though, that we are never alone. “Christ is with you on your journey every day of your lives! He has called you and chosen you to live in the freedom of the children of God. Turn to him in prayer and in love. Ask him to grant you the courage and strength to live in this freedom always.”
Deacon Dean Johnson serves at Church of the Holy Family, Sewell.
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