Who Tossed the Rock Through the Window? Time to Fess Up.

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”         --G.K. Chesterton, British author

“Who broke this window?!”

 A group of us neighborhood boys stood in a sidewalk line-up, something like 55 years ago, on a warm summer afternoon. One of us had thrown a rock through the glass front door of a home on our street, resulting in a pile of glass and some very scared and angry homeowners within. That rock was meant to get the attention of a boy who had taunted us, and then run home to hide. My mom or dad, or maybe another parent, played interrogator to our collection of miscreant minors. I remember vividly how I answered the question about who was guilty. Or not.

“Who did it?!”

“Not me!” I said, too immediately, with false confidence, my head held down, not even looking my accuser in the eyes. Of course, it was me who’d tossed that stone in anger. The first time in my young moral life that I remember crossing a line, so to speak.

First there was the rock. Then I had the chance to tell the truth and take responsibility for my actions, but nope. I didn’t stay on the correct side of a moral line that I’d been taught since birth. Failed to respect an ethical boundary between right and wrong, lessons taught to me by my family and by my faith.  

Don’t throw rocks through windows. You could hurt someone.

Always be honest too. Don’t lie. Especially to an adult, or worse, your parents. If you do the wrong thing fess up. Face the consequences. On that day long ago, I failed to do the right thing. I crossed a line, as I have many more times in this life. Not usually with rocks but with thoughts and with words and with things undone. All humans do this. Cross lines of healthy and loving behavior into not so healthy, less than loving behavior. 

We sin, stumble, screw up, become our worst selves. We pick up that rock.

A gift of trying to live an intentional spiritual life is that we can try, with God’s grace and forgiveness, to see the line, and then hold the line. One of the most important tasks of religion has always been to give its followers codes of conduct. Ways of life. Think of the Ten Commandments. Or Jesus’ teaching to love God, love neighbor, love self. Lines and laws that keep us in check when temptation gets too great.  

Yes, faith traditions have also fallen short in this work. We’ve vilified the wrong people or behaviors or worst, been hypocritical. Do as I say, not as I do. Yet when faith gets it right, it shows us how to live good lives. How to do the right thing. How to live so well, that the world is a better place for us having been here.

Because we also know what happens when line crossing becomes the norm in our world. When codes of conduct, when norms for behavior, are ignored or mocked as old fashioned or plain just run right over for expediency or moral relativity.

Then chaos results, hurt and fear in the wake of so much line crossing. Can we trust our neighbor or the stranger? Then there are the political and cultural influencers who are supposed to lead us with decency and honor but who instead lead as bullies and braggarts and blowhards. We pay a huge price for such communal line crossing. Individuals, families, communities, and nations, even democracy itself, threatens to fall apart.

Or we can try and try again to do that right thing. Not in braggy or self-righteous ways but in humility and hope. We can reject those who revel in their own wrongdoing and wears their indictments and transgressions like badges of honor.  We can remember that we are moral role models for our children, and kids on the teams we coach and in the classes we teach, in the friends we keep.

Yes, someone is always, has always, crossed the line. But for me, especially right now in our world and culture, it feels like there is so much more at stake when it comes to doing the right things or doing the wrong things.  I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic or going all chicken little-ish.  With an election looming and a planet reeling from wars and so much conflict, we need line respecters, now more than ever.    

What do you think?  

We all throw rocks and cross lines sometimes. But to live spiritually gives us the chance to confess, to make amends, to clean up our mess, and then to start all over again. 

Thanks for that second chance God.  And sorry about the rock.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.