When people talk about moral choices, they often describe things as being a "black or white" issue, (basically meaning something is clearly right or clearly wrong), or they talk about "grey areas," where there's no clear right and no clear wrong.
As useful as these terms are, I think they can, excuse the pun, color our view of morality. Black, white, and grey are precisely the colors that characterize the view we often have of morality: drab. Bland. Boring. Etc.
To me, morality can potentially be so much more, and should be so much more, especially when you introduce Jesus into the picture. When the light of Jesus's teachings illuminate that picture of morality, I find it full of the most brilliant colors. Morality can then be all sorts of different shades of green and blue and red and orange and purple and yellow and everything in between.
What I'm saying is, morality need not be dull. It only seems that way because we force it into rules, lessons, tracts, and 3-point sermons, and we hardly see it played out in real circumstances. Ask William Wallace if fighting for the freedom of his people was boring. Ask Martin Luther King if he was bored when he was battling racial injustice. Ask Mother Theresa if dedicating her life to the poor and oppressed was dull.
If morality conjures up bland, grey images in our minds, it's only because we don't understand it's true power.
3 comments:
Not to mention the injustice and racial ramifications of black and white morality.
I think we need to go to a blue, yellow, and green system.
What about the color pink?
How about if a little red morality slapped Ryan Bourque across the face just for the fun of it?
I'd laugh then.
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