It's Not Enough To Be Right...

For those of you who were not aware, I just completed a major undertaking. I finished reading Les Miserables. The work was worth it! If you haven't read it, you're in for a treat once you get there. Since I just wrapped it up, I thought I'd share one of the ideas which jumped out at me from the book.

"It's not enough to be right. You have to be right for the right reasons." Dr. Bauman hammered this key idea into us at Summit's Semester program. Arriving at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons leaves you with a weak foundation that ultimately will not support you. Victor Hugo pictured this in the character Javert.

To understand Hugo's picture though, we need to get to know Javert a bit. For Javert, right and wrong were determined by the state. If one was on the side of the state, then they were in the right and those opposed to it were in the wrong. To quote Hugo's description: "On the one hand he would say, 'A public official cannot be deceived; a magistrate is never wrong!' And on the other, "They are irremediably lost; no good can come of them.'"

Over the course of the book though, Javert's life intersects several times with Jean Valjean, the ex-convict whose life was turned around by his encounter with Bishop Myriel. Witnessing Valjean's changed life, including an act of mercy extended to Javert himself, leads to Javert to to rethink his view on the world. In the end, Javert's world is rocked:

"His ultimate anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt uprooted. The code was no longer anything but a stump in his hand. He was dealing with scruples of an unknown species. Within him there was a revelation of feeling entirely distinct from the declarations of the law, his only standard hitherto...An entire new world appeared to his soul...a mysterious justice according to God going counter to justice according to men. In the darkness he could see the fearful rising of an unknown moral sun; he was horrified and blinded by it. An owl compelled to an eagle's gaze."

Javert had, generally speaking, arrived at the right view of the world. The government is designed to enforce God's rule. To the degree that it does, rebellion against it is rebellion against God. However, Javert's foundation was the assumption that the government is infallible and therefore the standard for right and wrong. Discredit that assumption, make God the foundation, and nothing makes sense anymore for Javert. "He felt uprooted...An owl compelled to an eagle's gaze."

There are two lessons here for us. First, why you believe what you believe is just as important as what you believe. We shouldn't be content to settle for what seems to be the right answer - our goal should be to know why it is the right answer. Second, we should remember where absolute truth resides - in God. As hard as we work to understand "why", we will inevitably go astray, or find places where we have gone astray in the past, or find that we don't understand "why" as much as we should. The fact is, these discoveries can be unsettling. Suddenly realizing that the house you had worked hard to build was built with cards can be deeply disturbing. Remembering that God is the source of truth can help us to realize that what we are experiencing is not the world falling apart, but us realigning with the world as God created it.

I've found myself in Javert's shoes before and it's a pretty safe guess that I'll be back in them before long. Odds are, you're in a similar boat. Let's learn from Javert's experience and realize that even after doing our due diligence in studying out why we believe something, we could be wrong. Unlike Javert, finding out that we were wrong should not destroy us. Instead, we can turn to God as the source of all Truth for the answers we need and build again on a solid foundation.

Have you had an "owl compelled to an eagle's gaze" experience before? If so, what have you learned from it - whether a change in your thinking or lessons for how to work with similar experiences in the future?