Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference

by Desmond Tutu

The invitation to godly perfection, God’s invitation to wholeness, is an invitation to beauty. It is God’s invitation to us to be life artists, to be those who create lives of beauty. Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

In a life of wholeness, a life of godly perfection, we will still confront the death, grief, and pain that are part of human reality, but they will not destroy us. A life of wholeness can accept, even embrace, death, grief, and pain. They are essential parts of the fabric of life. They lend texture to life. In a life of wholeness, we will endure failures. And we will come to know so many of our own flaws. But that will not defeat us. A life of wholeness can meet failure as the wisest teacher. A life of wholeness can accept flaws and vulnerabilities as doors to relationship. If we can do all things flawlessly, we have no need of anybody else. That is not ubuntu. Flaws and vulnerabilities destroy the illusion of self-sufficiency and can open our eyes to our common humanity. Flaws and vulnerabilities can build the bridge to human community and to a relationship with the divine. In a life of wholeness we may face brokenness and endure woundedness, but our suffering will not be meaningless. Meaningless suffering is soul-destroying.

holiness is not a solo quest. Even the solitaries of ancient memory and modern description do not account themselves as people who are alone. The Desert Fathers and Mothers relied on their spiritual strength and a firm recognition of the presence of God to sustain their solitude. Those who withdraw to the wilderness become keenly aware of the companionship of the plants, birds, and animals that make their homes in the places that other human beings have not yet populated. The Bible offers God’s companionship for the journey. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel. In the rush of modern life, these are words we need to hear. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” God invites us not only to a different way of doing, but to a different way of being. We are invited to be at home in our own lives. What does it mean to be at home in our own lives? Ideally, our physical homes are the places where we shed all striving and pretense. They are the places where no artifice is required in our self-presentation. Being at home in our own lives is a kindred experience. When we are at home in our lives, thought and action are all of a piece.

We have explored how we can become life-artists. We can create lives of beauty that have space for the flaws and failures that are an inevitable part of the human experience. Creating a life of beauty is a choice. We are given the freedom to choose how we will use the gifts and challenges that we are given.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Match your pace to mine, imitate me. You are free to choose, you can choose to be like me. Wherever you are you can create beauty. Moment by moment you can create joy. Instant by instant you can offer kindness. Now and always you can make me seen. You can be as I created you to be, The visible likeness of the invisible. You will see as I see. And your heart will break

For all the sadness in the world. For all the hunger and pain. You will cry every tear with me And share every joy with me. You will see every sparrow fall. You will see each dying blade of grass. You will hear every child’s cry and every father’s despairing sigh. The terrified screams and hungry moans will be woven into the song of who you are and your heart will be broken and broken again. And then you know a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone. You will be alive!

Choice is a freedom each person has. God invests each of us with the freedom to choose. It is a very real freedom. We have the freedom to choose right. But that would be meaningless if there were not also the possibility that we would choose wrong. If there were no potential for evil, then our God-given freedom would be like the offerings of the old Ford Motor Company: “You can choose any color as long as it’s black.” A choice that is no choice at all.

beings. We must live with the banes and blessings of freedom, the gifts and the consequences of our choices. God could have created us to be automatons, programmed to do the right thing. Instead God took the incredible risk of saying that we are persons. We have a real autonomy. That autonomy may be limited in comparison to God’s autonomy, but it is real.

God has a profound reverence for our freedom. Because of this regard, God will not send an angel with a flaming sword to stand before us to turn us away from our chosen path. I often say that God would rather we go freely to hell than that we be compelled to enter heaven. Even if God does send messengers to challenge us, it is still possible that we will overrun them in our determination to achieve our evil ends. Yet even at that moment, the moment when we have bent our wills to evil, God is as close as our breath, loving us and willing us to turn aside, but God wills our change of heart in such a way that God does not undermine our autonomy.

God’s regard for our freedom does not leave us to our own devices to muddle through our choices on our own. The shepherd of Luke’s Gospel parable lets us see that God honors our choices yet seeks us out. “Which one of you,” Jesus asks, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” God is that shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep who have not been troublesome to go in search of the one that is lost. Can you believe it? He leaves ninety-nine perfectly good sheep, sheepish sheep, to go in search of one, and that one not intent on returning! Biblical literature is peppered with prophets who call the people back to God. In this role they are like the shepherd seeking out the lost sheep. In our own time there are individuals and organizations that serve a similar function. The ones that call our attention to environmental degradation and global warming exercise something of the prophetic function. Peace activists and human-rights campaigners who tell us truths we know but try to forget also speak in the prophetic voice. The function of the prophets was not to forecast doom but to call us back to a better way of living. Their task was and is to call us back to wholeness. But it is still our choice.

Wrong gratifies in the moment. The lie that gets us out of trouble in this instant often plagues us for hours or days to come. “Will I be found out?” we worry. “What other lie must I tell to make the first one stand?” we fret. The anxiety attached to the wrong may eventually make the fix seem worse than the ailment. Sometimes the effects of choices are not felt in our own lifetime but will be felt in a future that we will not inhabit. Because of global warming and environmental degradation, the choices we make today will dictate the quality of life our grandchildren can enjoy.

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. We know this even if we do not always practice it. We know that there are long-term health benefits to exercise. Each day we can choose whether or not we engage in it. We know that our families need both “quality time” and a substantial “quantity” of our time and attention to flourish. Every day we can choose whether and how we meet those needs. When we step out into our neighborhoods, we can engage in the practices of good neighborliness or we can choose not to. 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.” The disciplines of most religions are designed to support us in choosing good. The world we want will dictate the choices we make.

Choosing good regardless of the consequences isn’t the province only of freedom fighters. Choices and their consequences confront us every day.

us. In the deepest, most significant way, the goal of human life is not to wring the greatest personal pleasure out of every moment. The goal of human life is to live beyond the small, narrow prison of our own cares, wants, and worries. By learning to choose what is good and right, we give ourselves the keys to true freedom.

Choosing to do what is good becomes a habit. Like all habits, it can be learned and fostered.

Because I treasure the friendship with God that has developed in those times of prayer, the habit of choosing right has been reinforced. In any loving relationship there are two approaches to making the right decision. One can make the right decision out of fear—to stave off the beloved’s anger— or one can make the right decision to inspire the beloved’s delight. When we are truly free we act out of the impulse to delight, not out of the fear of falling out of favor.

When love is the motivation, the habit of choosing right becomes ingrained. It is etched into our being. When love is the motivation for choosing what is good and right, then what is wrong, no matter how expedient, is repellent.

As adults we can also cultivate the practice of choosing right. We can foster it in ourselves. 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. The practices of goodness are practices of vigilance and conscious choice. They are habits of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge supports the practices of goodness. When we are well acquainted with our gifts and our deficits, we know the challenges to goodness that require our extra vigilance. We know when our desire for goodness requires extra support. Choosing what is good and right is not intended to be a solitary journey. We can look to God to support our choices. We can look to friends or other guides to help us along the way.

Learning racism had to be a process. It wasn’t an instinct. Racism is evil, and evil goes against the grain of creation. Because we are made for goodness, the instinct to do what is right must be eroded to allow us to do what is wrong.

The horrors of apartheid did not spring from nothing into full bloom. In each case the path from goodness to evil was laid carefully. In order to permit ourselves to inflict wanton harm, our actions must be accompanied by a host of rationalizations and justifications.

Those we call national enemies are described first as “them” and then in progressively less human terms before the bombing can start.

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.

The practices of goodness—noticing, savoring, thinking, enjoying, and being thankful—are not hard disciplines to learn. But they are disciplines, and they take practice. The habits that allow wrong to become entrenched— mindlessness or tuning out, inattentiveness, the busyness of doing to distraction, and an ungrateful heart—can take hold so easily.

Real respite and restoration foster gratitude. When we allow ourselves to really rest, we can be thankful for the blessing of honest fatigue. When we experience full restoration we have the energy to honestly enjoy—to think and to savor. Rest and rejuvenation allow us to really pay attention. And this attention is a key discipline for the practices of goodness.

Evil does not sweep in like a tsunami; it bleeds into the fabric of life, washing out the joy and staining the beauty.

Choosing wrong is learned through a series of small decisions. Little failures become ingrained through repetition. The small faults, unchecked, open the way for all the vileness of which we are capable. In the next chapter we will see that suffering is part of the human condition. Sometimes we create our own suffering. Sometimes suffering comes unbidden, caused by others.

There is a choice in every moment. In every moment there is a chance to flourish and not to fail. Every instant is rich with possibility.

When we have done what is good, just, and right and our best efforts are met with failure, it is easy to doubt the presence of God. We couldn’t stop the apartheid machine in that moment. Year followed year, and the dehumanizing segregationists ruled our lives. We knew evil. Evil makes a child of God doubt that he or she is a child of God. In this place evil seemed always to hold the winning hand.

The God who waits for us is the same God who waits for all humanity.

We want the freedom to wander and the knowledge that we can return home to God. It is harder to accept God’s reverence for human autonomy when we are the victims. It is harder to accept God’s respect for human freedom when we must look with the God’s-eye view.

harm. The God who waits for the human change of heart is cold comfort to the victims of human brutality. But God does not have a double standard. That God is consistent as an answer to the eternal questions of God’s love and God’s presence really does not rest easy with us.

we do all have this capacity for compassion, even if in differing degrees. The ability to forgive even the smallest wrong depends, in part, on the belief that the perpetrator can act differently. Somewhere in our secret hearts we do in fact trust that this is a moral universe. Even if, in the moment, the power of goodness is invisible, we do trust that it exists.

Waiting for justice to be established is a challenge to us. It confounds our sense of how God is supposed to act. When our prayers for right to prevail seem to go unanswered, we may become angry with God; we may doubt God’s goodness, God’s presence, or the very existence of God. But it is this seeming silence that assures us that God is not capricious. If God were to intervene at our command, the regularity of nature would disappear. Life would become a cartoonlike contest as each person waged a kind of prayer warfare for control of the power of God.

Suffering is a part of the human condition. Suffering teaches us our limitations and our vulnerabilities. We can choose to let our suffering drive us into community as we recognize and share our common experience. But we can choose to allow the experience to drive us apart and isolate us from one another. The shame of victimhood can be the most isolating kind of suffering.