I’ve been thinking a lot about responsibility lately. About duty. There are a lot of ways to look at that feeling, but one that is on my mind a lot is my duty to the people around me. As a mentor, and as someone who is working to become a priest, what are my responsibilities? How is it appropriate for me to behave, and what do my ethics tell me about the decisions I make?

One of my most important ethics is something I touched on in my previous post. I don’t believe it’s ethical to force people into the path that I would take, or the path that I think is best. I would be a poor person indeed if I didn’t have my opinions, and if I wasn’t willing to share them when asked, but the purpose of my service is to help people become who they want to be, not who I think they should be.

This can be extremely frustrating, because there are times when I don’t agree with the path a person is setting themselves on, or when I think they are changing for the worse and that change is going to hurt them later.

Another part of this is the concept of meeting needs in my community. Not desires. Needs. Something that I have come up against time and time again is the deep and abiding difference between the desires a person has and expresses, and the need that is beneath those desires. It’s not my responsibility to fit the desires of the people around me. More importantly, I’m beginning to realize that I shouldn’t fulfill those desires on a consistent basis. Not because I don’t want people to be happy, but because more often than not, satisfying those desires has no real impact on a person or group of people. It seems that more often than not, giving a person or group what they’ve asked for either feeds their ego (often in a negative way), or actually is not desirable or cared thabout.

It is a well known truth that if Ford had listened to e desires of his customer, he would have produced a faster horse. Instead, he found what the need and created the first automobiles. While I don’t wish to sound cynical, en masse, as a body, people are stupid, and have no idea what the need is that their desires fill. As a result, I’ve found that listening to what people say they want, particularly as a group, doesn’t produce change. If you’re lucky it produces momentary happiness. If you’re unlucky it feeds egoism and entitledness. If you’re really unlucky it breeds flat out discontent and anger.

So I find myself in the odd position of having to make decisions and choices that I know very well are going to make some people unhappy in the short term. They are going to mutter that I’m elitist (which is true), that I’m not listening to them (which is not true), and some of them will question my motivations. This will be very hard for me to deal with. I’ve grown accustomed to being liked as an adult. I’ve worked very hard to overcome my shyness and introversion, to be social and friendly, and to make myself open to anyone who wants or needs to talk. I may have to let that go so I can serve a higher calling.

I will probably not cease to think about those things though. I will not begin to not care what the perception of me is. I accept that I may not be universally liked, indeed that I may be disliked by some or many. But perception does matter, and if that means I have to explain myself once in a while, my ego is not so large that I can’t answer a few questions honestly, nor that I can’t accept criticism or debate about my choices.