PRIVATE INTEGRITY
What we do in secret ultimately shapes the person whom we present in public. Dishonesty changes the very way we look because it changes who we are. That’s the reason why so often those around us will intuit the truth about us, smell the lie, even when they don’t have any hard evidence on which to suspect us.
Doing something in secret that we can’t admit in public is the very definition of hypocrisy and hypocrisy forces us to lie. And lying, among all sins, is perhaps the most dangerous. Why? Because we hate ourselves for it and we stop respecting ourselves. When we stop respecting ourselves, we will, all too soon, notice that other people stop respecting us too.
The biblical image of the honest sinner humbly turning towards God is predicated precisely on honesty, on the sinner not hiding or lying about his or her sin. When we don’t honestly admit our sin we move in the opposite direction, namely, towards rationalization, hardness of attitude, and cynicism. When we hide a sin, we are forced to lie, and with that lie we immediately begin to harden and reshape our souls. You can do anything, as long as you don’t have to lie about it. That’s very different than saying that you can do anything as long as nobody finds out about it.
We should never delude ourselves into thinking that the things we do in private, including very small actions of infidelity, of self-indulgence, of bigotry, of jealousy, or of slander, are of no consequence since no one knows about them. Inside the mystery of our interconnectedness as a human family and as a family of faith and trust, even our most private actions, good or bad, like invisible bacteria inside the blood stream, affect the whole. Everything is known, felt, in one way or another.
Others know us, even when they don’t exactly know everything about us. They smell our vices just as they smell our virtues.
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