He was a small boy when the priest had taken him to one side.
For him, this was an earthshattering experience. A private heart-to-heart talk that had followed the choirboy’s dishonesty, when asked whether he had taken a hymnbook home. This was forbidden, of course. The clergyman had seen him take the small book from his pocket and return it to the pile. The fact that the boy’s intentions were that he study the words to improve his performance as a chorister, wasn’t the problem. It was his lying about taking it home that had prompted such a powerful lecture. It had frightened him, and it was as a result of this incident that he had promised himself that he would never ever tell another lie. After committing this principal to his ongoing life, and by that, to his overall developing lifestyle, the die had been cast.
At first, this newly adopted mantra was comparatively easy to maintain. This was partly down to the fact that he had from the beginning decided to keep this self-imposed rule to himself. However, as time passed and he moved through his teen age years into early adulthood, marriage and fatherhood, his vow of honesty gradually began to take its toll. Over so many years of preserving this level of moral rectitude, little by little, a negative aspect became more and more apparent. It had always been obvious to him that telling the truth had often hurt the feelings of others. In a way, he had thought that recipients of these truths would eventually come to the conclusion that he just couldn’t help himself when it came down to telling it like it was, regardless of how it was taken. In general terms, with most of his immediate friends and family, this was the case.
However, a growing number of embarrassing incidents gave him cause to reflect on his future intentions. On reflection, he realised that none of the past decades of strict honesty could be unravelled. He knew that to refer back to any single time when he had used a truth that had caused displeasure or even worse, and to attempt in some way to correct it, would inevitably start some kind of domino effect. He found himself in an inextricable trap, and the notion that he could in no way release himself from such an ongoing and unending entanglement made his head swim. He wanted to disengage, to somehow free himself.
As a result of these emerging desires, in the main he had taken on a fairly antisocial attitude during his later years. This had successfully reduced the risk of offending others with what he would quite naturally regard as the truth. It is now, in his late nineties and feeling his life slipping away gradually, he looked back. Back to that time spent with the priest. A time when he had put in place a moral code that had bound him throughout his life.
Now, finally, he considered that he was close enough to the end of his days to allow himself to freely reflect on the notion that what had started all that time ago was, in fact, a curse!
