Profession or Practice

We are guided in our lives by principles and values, things we were taught, perhaps, and which we've evaluated and adopted as worthy.  So, regarding those principles, our foundation for beliefs and behavior ... 

Our definitions require some practical clarity.

Important choices can require difficult work, honest analysis

Honesty, integrity, unselfishness, and love -- those are the standards we profess and toward which we strive.  These are not feelings we have.  They are the standards for actions we take, and the bar is a high one.

Arrogance and pride, greed and envy, anger, excess, and self -- those are the fail points, the corruption of any good intent.  Easily recognized in others, these are almost invisible to our self-awareness.  It's a difficult task for everyone.

The principles we profess versus the values we practice ... living a principled life can be challenging.

Sr Advisor to the Officer for Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at Department of Homeland Security August 2010 to July 2018

Scott Shuchart was senior staff at the DHS. He quit after officials ignored legal and ethical concerns that he and others raised over the separation of children from their parents at the border.

"... family separation was ... a deliberate human rights violation that senior members of the Administration wanted to undertake—where ... doing harm was the point.  Like use of military force, the idea of separating families was to use the fact of child trauma to change their parents’ behavior. I thought that was illegal (contrary to treaties and to the substantive due process prong of the Fifth Amendment), un-American, and seriously wrong."  

The courts have agreed.  It was and is illegal and an ethical failure of this administration and many appointees.

"Congress needs to undertake real oversight of what has happened in DHS in the last few years .... And I would love to have some further scrutiny of particular things that have gone very badly, such as Custom and Border Protection’s inability to keep records on the parents and children it separated, though there’s also some litigation that should bring those facts out too."

We profess our Christian values, we sing the songs in church, and we want to be right-thinking.  Then we make choices, day after day, year after year.  Sometimes, we get close to the standard,  and sometimes we're in the cesspool of corruption, and we're barely aware of the difference.  Unless ...
We have to continually pull back from the press of life and others, at least long enough to be reminded of what the standard is for right choice.  We face hard decisions every day.

• If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?
• Defend the weak, uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed, rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
• If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?
• By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

Our interestingly polarized culture has retreated from many moral standards in recent decades.  It leaves one to wonder if perhaps our current chaotic environment is intended to pull back the curtain so we can see a bit more clearly who we have become.