Sister Joan Chittister, a popular author of books on contemporary spirituality and a Benedictine nun, posed a question that stopped me in my tracks: “in the last three things that went wrong in your community, who did you blame?”
Daily, almost hourly, our Narcissist-in-Chief models an answer to that question as blame is assigned to everyone, anyone, everywhere, and never to himself. Yet long before he appeared, our culture already regularly encouraged us to blame others, not ourselves, when whatever we had hoped for did not appear, when our tidy lives were upset by some unanticipated circumstance, when we saw neighbors struggling and assumed their struggles were the result of unwise choices they had made.
Yet I found myself heading in the opposite direction in response to Chittister’s question, since whenever almost anything in my life has gone awry I have quickly assumed the blame was mine. Perhaps because the spiritual paths I have followed gave primacy to individual effort and responsibility, or perhaps because I took as gospel truth the cultural messages about being able to have anything I wanted if I made a consistent effort, I took on the accompanying element in that message: if I can do anything provided I set my mind to it, if I am responsible for making my own life and way in the world, I am also responsible if my life is not what I wanted, if my way in the world does not take me where I intended.
So where is the reality? Where does blame lie for the sadness and suffering all around, for the hard experiences that enter any life? And once I have assigned blame, however I assign it, then what? Does blaming help reach a solution? I do know that blame is a way for me to understand how something happened, as it provides a cause, a starting point. But maybe expending energy on blame is ultimately unhelpful. I fall back on a Buddhist story where an individual in a crowd was shot with a poisoned arrow. Everyone around the wounded person began looking for the culprit. The narrator of the story notes that it would have been far better to focus on helping the person who was shot, as that was where the need was greatest.
I admit to deriving a grim sort of pleasure from blaming the abysmal leaders who currently hold power. They are just so clearly wrong. Yet I suspect I might get more pleasure, and even counter their wrongness more effectively, if I set aside my blaming energies and put those energies into helping right what is wrong. Because maybe knowing who is responsible, holding someone accountable, however right and good, is an effort for another day when the world is not on fire.