Many folks belong to religious traditions in which a core premise exists: as individuals and in our social groups we fail in our twinfold pact with God to (a) love God without holding anything back at any time and (b) love other folks with equal effort and consistency. In spite of these failings we hold tight to a belief that God keeps loving us no matter how often or how severely we fail to live as expected. Whether we put it into words or not all of us expect God to forgive our "trespasses", "sins", and other failings. Religious types call this expected response on God's part "grace."
I am no longer surprised that human beings fail to love as expected. Our tendency to make ourselves the center of our universe probably accounts for our difficulties in this respect. I remain perplexed, however, by the widespread inability to generalize our expectation must forgive us various transgressions into a universal rule that everyone else should be likewise forgiven.
Having worked within social support initiatives across my professional career I have noticed this hypocrisy appearing in two forms: (1) in vicious backbiting, name-calling, and similar nastiness towards companion workers and other people we know, and (2) the curious inability to extend to people we know (and some we don't) the core expectation underlying social support work--that people in our communities should grant more grace to the clientele's we serve. We have trouble translating the mission we impose upon others into a behavioral norm for ourselves. Consider, for example, the irony built into many offender reentry programs where other employers are asked to grant former inmates consideration and grace that the agency itself will not extend to its own workers. Similar examples abound in every social initiative.
Accepting my human failings has become easier each year that passes. Making fewer mistakes became impossible against the weight of my collective errors. These days I hope only to remember more often that the foregiveness I want for the errors of my way ought to extend equally to how I act toward everyone else.
