Lying

Let me pass along a simple word to the wise about lying.

Don’t.

Be honorable in speech and action. Be decent. Be the sort of human being you want to have around you.

It’s the spiritual thing to do.

Do you trust people who are sometimes honest, sometimes not? Think about it. Why would you? They prove themselves unworthy by their words and actions. Until such time as they have a conversatio morum — a Latin phrase meaning a conversion of manners, a change of behavior for the better — that can be seen and believed, how can they possibly be trusted?

This can be terribly painful for the person who is lied to. It’s a tough spot to be in if the person lying to you is a part of your daily life at home, work or play. If you are in the daily presence of someone who purposefully refuses to treat you with the same respect with which they expect you to treat them.

Then what?

What can a person attempting to live a decent and honorable spiritual life do?

We have choices.

The first is to make absolutely certain that one’s own words and actions are as unfailingly truthful as one can achieve. That means going above and beyond what is considered socially feasible to what can truly be achieved. As we are all human, it is our responsibility to not fail ourselves, each other or our Creator. In the event that we slip and realize we are in error, we are duty bound to correct that error as quickly as we can work it out.

That is because we do not wish to be thought untrustworthy.

We also have to dig down deep within ourselves. It’s our responsibility to ourselves to review our spiritual and worldly situation regarding the other person. Think hard about why that person is in your life. Are there ties that bind? Not just blood ties. Is it a relationship of long standing? Does the person have other redeeming features, sometimes in spite of their inability to be consistently honest? Has the person proven themselves worthwhile in other ways?

If you do start walking down that road, keep going. That relative, friend or acquaintance may have positive qualities which we don’t often think about. There may be good qualities that you are not particularly apt to think about when you are on the receiving end of a lie. However, those other positive qualities are there.

Annoying as it is to sometimes have to do the work rather than judge out of hand, we have to review how we fit into each other’s lives. Take another step. Consider how our relationship with that one person affects other people in our life. We are responsible for assessing how we interact individually and jointly with a group of people and with the world at large. Something which rarely comes to mind is how we interact with the rest of the world without that person. We can be perfectly pleasant or utterly miserable.

The fact is that, as much as the person who lies drives us around the bend when they lie, they may actually have positive qualities.

It’s much easier to deal with a person who is a total rotter. When we deal with dishonest people whose actions are typically questionable at best, we know that the rest of the world is subjected to the same immoral treatment. No one may mind to learn that the dishonest person has been dropped from your circle because of their insistence on maintaining their horrible behavior. We’ve all seen it happen.

As difficult as that may be with relatives, friends and coworkers, it eventually becomes a matter of sustaining one’s sanity and one’s own morality. Who needs to be led down the road to hell by an immoral being?

Under normal circumstances we expect to hear all about why someone is absolutely unredeemable. That is not reality.

Some people leave everything to be desired.

Most of us of feet that sometimes turn to clay. If someone else infuriates us with a behavior we find unconscionable, Lord only knows how we drive them around the bend.

When all else fails, do the most outrageous thing possible.

Forgive.