OUR DEADLY PREOCCUPATION WITH OUR ‘INNOCENCE’

Oswald Chambers giving me, or anyone, lots to chew over in a short daily reading and meditation, is no surprise. The surprises are in how alarmingly relevant his observations often are today.

“We begin by trusting our ignorance and calling it innocence, by trusting our innocence and calling it purity; and when we hear [certain] statements of Our Lord’s, we shrink and say — But I never felt any of those awful things in my heart. We resent what Jesus Christ reveals….Am I prepared to trust His penetration, or do I prefer to trust my innocent ignorance?”
I am very afraid that most of us on this slowly cooking globe would much, much rather trust that (in my opinion) not-so-innocent ignorance.

I suggest this ignorance is not as innocent as many of us seek to make it out to be for one fairly simple reason. Even worse, we Americans are anything but unique in fetishizing our imagined innocence, although we may be peculiarly obnoxious trumpeters of it.

All we need to do is look at such places as Russia and probably nearly every Muslim-majority country (don’t know enough about India or the Far East to guess about those cultures) to see how prevalent ‘the-Devil (or you, I, he or she)-made-me-do-it’ type of rationales are as opposed to taking real responsibility for one’s own actions and acknowledging being a beneficiary of crimes against a society’s traditional scapegoats and/or nature itself. That last is just about set to become much more consequential, I’d say.