let's hope that it displays on the published page. One day in the vintage clothing store that she owns we were commenting together that for all of us hypocrisy is inevitable. One of her staff, an idealistic twenty-something still in the green side of her twenties piped up "Speak for yourselves," My Turkish friend and I exchanged meaningful glances and one of us, I can't remember who, said, "But she will learn in a few years, wait till she's our age."Life seems to be for most of us an unbroken line of little compromises, small abdications, minor consenting to not only failing to live up to our high values but downright undermining them. We slowly and gradually commit this long protracted spiritual suicide in order to keep on living. I think here of the line from the Judy Collins' song "Albatross" "You must barter your life to make sure you are living."
I was more or less the young woman's age, twenty-three, when I first really began to think of this, not the hypocrisy so much as the utter lack of consistency to our human nature. In the Mennonite house church, the Green House, of which I have already written in an earlier post this subject came up during a discussion period in one of our worship services and we were all roundly shocked to learn of the unnoticed humanity of some of the most brutal architects of the Nazi atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich. The Fuhrer's officers and generals were not always, twenty-four/seven the evil monsters that their work turned them into. No they would each go home to their happy Aryan wives and bounce on their knees their laughing little Franzes and Heidis, following their dinner of schnitzel and sauerkraut. There was an absolute disconnect between the Jew killing monsters and the loving husbands and doting daddies they were at home. It makes me think of how a mother tiger will not eat her cubs (but look out for dad!) even though any other smaller vulnerable animal would be breakfast lunch or dinner.
I have my own share of inconsistencies and hypocrisies in my life. I do try to live up to my high standards and often end up achieving this by lowering the bar however discreetly and subtly. One example, I am vegetarian, but I also wear leather shoes and a leather belt. I express concern about animal rights or at least that they are treated well in captivity but I still buy and eat eggs produced by battery hens. I am strongly in favour of food sustainability and organic environmentally friendly farming prices but when I am shopping for food the best deal takes priority so that I am still likely subsidizing Monsanto and Franken Food through my self-interested food choices. I am also on a low income and simply cannot afford to eat ethically. On the other hand I could content myself with paying double what I pay for food and cut back on my annual travelling holidays, but this is the first time in my life that I have been able to freely travel like this, despite my low income, and I am nearing sixty, and even though I will likely enjoy robust good health into my nineties there is no guarantee of this. I am a staunch defender of the environment and recycle almost everything but as I mentioned, I fly every year and even though I don't drive I still contribute prettily to air pollution and climate change through global warming. I used to buy fair trade cocoa but drinking cocoa made me fat, I am loosing weight right now and settling for a few chocolate chips each evening to take care of my chocolate craving. The chocolate chips I buy are not fair trade, may be the product of human rights abuses and while savouring the semi sweet decadence I am still haunted by images of children in the Ivory Coast being whipped and beaten for not producing enough on the cocoa plantations. And the fair trade chocolate is whoppingly and scandalously expensive and often not very great tasting. I am still a client of the Royal Bank and regardless of how awful they are I am just too lazy to shuffle over to a credit union. I will say nothing here about how readily I fail to live up to my other ethics as a Christian but really I stink of hypocrisy. I also work, struggle and scramble against being a hypocrite but, you know none of us is ever going to quite get there so we had might as well cut each other and ourselves tons of slack and compassion while never giving up the fight.
This isn't to say that I will never change these things and perhaps having made this confession will even accelerate me into getting my ducks in a row.
I am also thinking of the beautiful hypocrisy of my Turkish friend. For a long time in front of her vintage clothing store she had a free box in front on the sidewalk. Anyone could drop whatever clothes they didn't need and anyone could pick up whatever free garments that tickled their fancy. She could have made a profit off many of these items but was happy to give back to the community. While I was homeless and extremely poor I clothed myself handsomely thanks to her free box. On top of that she bought three of my paintings. There was a catch however. For the first two peacocks I had to agree to spend half the price of each painting buying clothes from her store. I couldn't help but oblige her. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I found the clothes in the free box to be of superior quality and more to my personal taste.
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