Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference

by Desmond Tutu

Attached to that notion of “being good” are all the “oughts” and “shoulds” that we think will win us the prize we truly crave: God’s love and divine favor. We are wearing ourselves out in a quest to buy what is already ours: God’s unmerited love. I will begin by sharing a very personal story about unmerited love.

Each generation finds a new focus for its anxious yearning. In our world our self-worth seems so bound up in outdoing each other. We have this arbitrary set of standards against which we are constantly measuring ourselves, and we never measure up.

Though wrong gratifies in the moment, good yields its gifts over a lifetime. Each time we choose good, we add to the human treasury of goodness. Whether we make choices for ourselves and our personal health or we make choices for our family, community, and planet, we can choose good.

The quality of life on our planet now and in the future will be determined by the small daily choices that we make as much as by the big decisions in the corridors of power. Gandhi proclaimed that we must “be the change we want to see.”

Life is more than breath and a heartbeat; meaning and purpose are the life of life. When we recognize that our lives have meaning beyond our cares and comforts, we tap the source of true joy.

The Christian Gospels have a series of passages that enjoin the reader to “keep awake.” Modern culture would prefer that we move through life half asleep. We are encouraged to make selections by default, not by conscious choice. So sometimes we do not actively opt to do wrong. But because we don’t actively choose to do what is right, we slip into wrongness.

Choosing what is good and right is a practice that can be learned. But as we will see in the next chapter, we can also slide down the slope of misdeeds into the habits of wrongness. I will begin by telling you about two encounters from my childhood that underscore this point.

In the Bible, depravity does not enter creation in a tidal wave of wrongness. It comes in as a slow, silent leak, drip by quiet drip, until the earth is flooded. This was true of the biblical history. It is true in world history. It holds true for our own lives. We do not veer off the rails in an explosion of error. We make a succession of uncorrected missteps, and then when we check, the good we would do seems far out of reach.

The once-popular message “Love means never having to say, ‘I’m sorry’” is quite wrong. Love means daring to say, “I’m sorry.” In fact, given who we are, love means saying “I’m sorry” early and often. Mpho’s husband, Joe, is a sturdy tower of a man. Mpho tells him he is never manlier than when he crouches down to apologize to one of his children for an unjust reprimand or an excess of temper. Apology and forgiveness break the hold of wrongness. Self-forgiveness may be the golden key that frees us from slipping into the habit of choosing wrong.

When hardships befall us, we cry out to heaven, “Why me?” When good fortune attends us, it is the grateful heart that has the courage to ask, “Why me?” The Buddhist practice of mindfulness and the daily examen of Ignatian spirituality point to the same end: when we pay attention, it is possible to halt evil in its tracks. Paying attention also helps us to see how easy it is to become inured to the proliferation of evil. Evil does not sweep in like a tsunami; it bleeds into the fabric of life, washing out the joy and staining the beauty.

Each of us, in our own time and place, can offer our suffering as a drop in the bucket of human agency that reshapes the course of history. The story of the villagers of Mogopa is one illustration of human agency in

the course of history. It is a story of faith. It is also a confirmation that this is a moral universe. Evil may, indeed, hold sway for the moment, but evil does not have the last word.

The people who wait and watch, fret and pray, have only their compassion to offer. Compassion, which literally means “suffering with,” may feel like the most futile kind of suffering. It changes nothing. It holds no hope of changing anything. Yet to be compassionate is to see with a God’s-eye view.

Human life is marked with failures large and small. Those mistakes and misdeeds either teach life lessons or remain as unhealed wounds on the psyche.

What might our lives feel like if we didn’t march through them with a scorecard, keeping a tally of our failures and successes? How would it be to stop pretending omniscience? Can you imagine being able to trust that the outcome of your efforts will be right, whatever the outcome? Even when it looks as though every effort is marked with failure?

You do not need to be a churchman to live a surrendered life. All of us can trust that choosing goodness will always, ultimately, result in creating rightness. And anyone can decide to choose goodness. Anyone can decide to set aside the tally list of successes and failures—and the stress and anxiety that accompany the task of keeping the list current. None of us can see eternity. None of us knows with perfect clarity what the end will be. But when we choose goodness we can be certain that, in the fullness of time, the end will be right.

The journey to apology and restoration is shorter than it once was. This can be true for anybody. Anyone can make the decision to be more mindful of his words and deeds and of their effects. Anyone can choose to cultivate compassion. Anyone can commit herself to returning ever more speedily to the goodness that is her true home.

In an extraordinary way, we can return to goodness more quickly when we have a clear vision of the present. That clarity about the present is rooted in making peace with the past. Putting words to our pain begins the process of building that peace. In

speaking the truth of our pain, we start to collect the memories of what we have done or experienced. When we retell our stories we can be heard into healing. We can be heard back to wh...

Often people come to us not asking for advice or counsel. We don’t have to have the answer. We don’t have to solve the problem. They just want a listening ear. A listening ear can help people to work out their own wisdom. A friend who serves as a chaplain is surprised by the number of times she emerges from a hospital room with the patient’s words of gratitude ringing in her ears: “You were so helpful.” “I didn’t do anything,” she confides, “I just sat, listened, and smiled, or sighed, and nodded. They figured it all out for themselves.”

When we forgive, we reclaim the power to create. We can create a new relationship with the person who has injured us. We can create a new story of ourselves. When we find the strength to forgive, we are no longer victims. We are survivors.

Prayer is how we communicate with God, and how God communicates with us. Communication is a skill.

We address God in the quiet of our hearts, in hymns and psalms, in dance and chant, with tears, with pleas, and with rejoicing. Each day as I return to the practice of prayer I learn new ways to hear God. Each day I learn new ways to address God.

The practice of prayer helps us to discern, from among the many voices we hear and choices we face each day, which is the guiding voice of God.

The challenge of distinguishing the voice of God from all the voices that vie for our attention is not unique to our time. Jesus used the metaphor of the shepherd to reassure his followers that they can recognize the voice of God from among the voices they hear. In Jesus’s time, the sheep that belonged to the members of a village or community would be penned together overnight. In the morning each shepherd would come to the gate of the enclosure. He would call his sheep and lead them out to pasture. The sheep could distinguish among the voices of all the shepherds, and they would follow the sound of their shepherd’s voice. Our times of prayer are the times when we learn the guiding voice of goodness, our shepherd’s voice. In our daily lives, when the stillness has fled and the fullness of life has rushed back in on us, we will still be able to discern the voice that calls us to our best selves from among the many voices that compete for our attention.

The competition for our attention is fierce. The voices of our own desires claw at us. Inside our heads the voices of employers or workplace supervisors drone on with unsatisfied demands. On our internal play list, the voices of friends and family are an unending clamor. Our hopes, our joys, our rages, and our fears create a raucous crowd. But even in the midst of that riot there is a quiet, constant voice that guides us to goodness. The voice of God is an affirming voice. It does not reduce us or belittle us. It seeks to e...

Prayer is the time and place to hear God’s guidance for our lives. Prayer is also where we are best able to hear the voice of God’s loving acceptance.

we find it hard to hold on to the truth that, for God, we have nothing to earn, nothing to prove. We are accepted just as we are.

Even if there is no one in your life who has demonstrated the pattern of acceptance to you, it is a pattern that you can discover for yourself. It is a gift you can give yourself. You can come to recognize how beautiful you really are. You can come to know how precious you are to God. Do you have any idea how precious you are to God? Don’t you know that you are so precious that even the hairs on your head are numbered? You are so precious that your name is inscribed on the palm of God’s hand. It’s not just written there—so that it might be erased, rubbed out. Your name is inscribed, etched, actually carved on the palm of God’s hand.

The onerous duty of “doing good” disappears once we recognize that we have no need to impress God with our success. When we really grasp our own goodness, we realize that we have no need to “buy” God’s approval. We are already loved. We are already accepted. When we can accept our acceptance, the texture of life changes.

If we accept our own acceptance all of the things we hold to be inherent, negative attributes of human nature—greed and laziness, rage and jealousy—will be unmasked. We will come to recognize them as fear in disguise. We hoard against the fear that we will not have enough. We overspend because we think more things will silence our dread of having nothing. We are lazy and we procrastinate lest we prove to be incapable. We think that we can hide behind the fiction that we have not failed if we have not tried.

Sometimes it can be hard to see ourselves as God sees us. It can be impossible to imagine God’s loving gaze. Maybe you don’t recall ever being looked at lovingly. Perhaps you experience every gaze as critical, judgmental, disapproving, or, at best, indifferent. But that is not how God looks at us. God’s gaze is like the gaze between lovers wrapped in a tender embrace. God looks at us the way a mother looks lovingly at her newborn baby.