‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’
I do realise I ‘go on a bit’ about how much we learned from Master Lawlor in Johnstown N.S. I thought of ‘the master’ last week when listening to the news concerning the most recent French elections.
One day in Johnstown, our history lesson was on the French Revolution. (Yes, we are talking primary school education here). It is how our teacher talked us through history and his overriding comments that made the thing stick. ‘The man working the guillotine was constantly complaining of not having enough sand’, we were told. Master Lawlor’s words came back last week because he said; ‘The French never could hold a government together since the revolution – how could they have luck.’
But not everything we were taught in Johnstown was right, accurate or good for us. The totally narrow and biased version of two subjects took many of us a long time to untangle. The two subjects I refer to were Irish history and religion. Both are complicated to understand, never mind to teach or explain. We received an overly green version of one and a dreary grey and frightening presentation of the other. I hasten to add that this was never the teacher’s fault – because this was how our country beholdened these two fundamental gospels according to Church and State.
Johnstown equipped me with everything I needed to launch myself on the world, but we don’t stop learning just because we discard the school-bag. I continued to learn and am still working on it. I learned from people I met and one of the first such lessons, which I struggled to accept, was the reasoning that mine might not, after all, be the only ‘one true religion’ and that there are many parallel roads leading to God.
I learned first-hand about people and countries when I worked in Canadian bush-camps. Many different nationalities and cultures were represented – men of all religions and of none. Because we were confined to living and working together we naturally enjoyed each other’s company and the subsequent conversations, debates and arguments. There were two ‘inmates’ per room and I want to tell you about a German guy called Klaus who was bunked in the room next to me.
Klaus was incredibly intelligent. He had fully mastered the English language in the six months before I knew him. The young me, then 23 years of age, was shocked almost beyond words when my friend told us he was an atheist – and he could make such a damn good job of articulating his argument for being so. I wondered at first if perhaps the devil had come among us.
I thought I had him when I introduced the subject of the Ten Commandments. Big mistake … Klaus knew them off by heart; whereas for me, I was glad there were ten of them, so I could truthfully admit I only broke them in single figures!
‘They do not belong to you or your religion’, Klaus insisted. ’90 per cent of what you are saying is the manual by which all good people, or those trying to be honest and decent, live their lives – only most don’t use the word ‘commandments’ There were four of us, sitting on the edge of two beds and no matter what argument I made, Klaus was edging it …
Klaus was loving this and an evening or two later he brought up the subject again; with a novel question laced with a hint of devilment. We had to go through the Ten Commandments and rearrange them; not as they were listed, but in what we believed were their order of importance. This was a brilliant antidote against boredom and must have lasted a week of evenings. It started off real easy when there was unanimous agreement that Nummer Ein, should be; ‘Thou shalt not Kill.’
Well, after that, there was more debate, promoting, demoting and cases made for and against every sin in the book. I remember now that after settling on number one, the one agreed upon as least important – and slotted in at number 10; was the one we all had ambition to break as soon as we got to town! One way or the other, four guys thrown together in a mining camp got great mileage out of The Ten Commandments!
So, dear reader, in which order of importance would you list the Ten Commandments?
I have said here before, that if there is a Day of Judgment and we are all held to account, the same letter of the law won’t be applied to all defendants. Our individual circumstances and inherent weaknesses will be taken into account by the Almighty … with one exception.
We will be judged mostly, I believe, on how we treated our fellow man. This is why ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ is my second most important commandment. There is no mitigation for breaking this one … which may cause a bit of bother for a few sad souls.
Don’t Forget
Even the hypocrite admires righteousness. That is why he imitates it.
Image: Photo of Johnstown school taken from a painting by local artist, Sean Kelleghan
