Tread lightly on the things of earth

The [Schiavo] case is full of great ironies. A large part of Terri’s hospice costs are paid by Medicaid, a program that the administration and conservatives in Congress would sharply reduce. Some of her other expenses have been covered by the million-dollar proceeds of a malpractice suit — the kind of suit that President Bush has fought to scale back.

— NPR commentator Daniel Schorr, as cited in today’s SojoMail

Saying one thing and doing another, as our leaders are demonstrating, isn’t working too well; its results aren’t sustainable. Let’s embrace integrity instead.

in·teg·ri·ty n.

1. Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
2. The state of being unimpaired; soundness.
3. The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.

Surely integrity — consistency in thought, word, and deed borne of a sound heart and informed mind — will sit better in front of God and everybody than its opposite, hypocrisy:

hy·poc·ri·sy n.

1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. An act or instance of such falseness.

If I support torture and war — or if I support leaders who support torture and war — while I claim to promote a “culture of life,” for example, then I’ve pretty much torpedoed the credibility of my witness. Insisting on both implies falseness somewhere. Integrity demands a more consistent approach: If we choose to affirm life, then by God we better buckle down and affirm it across the board — across peoples, across contexts, and across time (from before birth through natural death).

Else we risk the charge I’d rather us not have to hear:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. …

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?

Providing this turning point for us to think deeply about issues of life and death, to examine our motivations and our commitment to integrity, to fearlessly assess whether our hearts have become stone or our necks stiff, to wash the blood off our hands and peel the scales from our eyes, in time to mend our ways, may be Terri’s lasting gift to us: She’s helped reveal the beast^*. Once we see it, we can stop bowing down to it; we can stop granting it power to divide and destroy.

Go in peace, dear one; arise whole in a better place.

This is the great hope of Easter:
Death no longer binds us. Hence, fear needn’t bind us, either.

*Visible now, for example, in a government willing to invade private citizens’ privacy and override the rule of law to appease its base. If the problem with this isn’t clear, see Juan Cole’s observation on the all-too-thoroughly precedented logical extension of this hisba-like behavior: “It will reduce the rights of the individual in favor of the rights of religious and political elites to control individuals.”