Accountability

I have always had a question about accountability that I don't think I have completely answered for myself. It comes to mind whenever some public figure is being examined for a decision he or she has made. This week, for example, there has been a good deal of discussion about Ed Sheeran and the decisions surrounding his concerts. The details are complicated, involving promoters, venues, other performers and the terrible war in Gaza, and Sheeran has publicly acknowledged mistakes and spoken about the difficulty of navigating the situation. What interests me, however, is not so much the question of whether he made the right decision. It is the larger question that seems to sit underneath these controversies: Why are we so certain that other people should be accountable for their choices, while we rarely seem to ask the same question of ourselves?

Perhaps this is simply part of being human. We want the world to make moral sense. When someone does something we believe is wrong, we want to know who was responsible and whether that person will be held to account. We become particularly interested when the person is famous, because fame puts someone's choices under a much brighter light. We discuss what the celebrity should have known, what the politician should have done, what the writer should have said, or what the public figure ought to have understood. Sometimes those questions are entirely legitimate. People with influence do have responsibilities, and there are circumstances in which decisions deserve careful scrutiny.

Yet I sometimes wonder what would happen if we turned that same attention, that same bright light, toward the much smaller world of our own lives.

We are generally quite good at identifying the ways other people have failed us. Most of us can remember, sometimes with remarkable clarity, the friend who disappointed us, the parent who didn't understand us, the spouse who said something hurtful, the colleague who treated us unfairly, or the family member who should have behaved differently. We can usually explain why their behaviour mattered and why they ought to have known better. But our own stories are more complicated because we know all the circumstances surrounding our choices. We remember how tired we were, how badly we had already been treated, how frightened or disappointed we felt, what the other person had done first and all the things they didn't understand about us. We know our intentions, even when our behaviour didn't live up to them.

And that creates an interesting little problem. We tend to judge other people by what they did, while we judge ourselves by what we meant.

Likely that is why accountability is such a difficult idea. It asks us to acknowledge that our reasons may be real without allowing those reasons to erase the consequences of our choices. I may have been genuinely hurt and still have been unkind. I may have had a perfectly understandable reason for withdrawing from someone and still have caused them pain. I may have been provoked and still have been responsible for what came out of my mouth. The circumstances surrounding our behaviour matter enormously, but they do not necessarily remove our responsibility for what we do with those circumstances.

This becomes especially interesting in our closest relationships because those are the places where there is rarely an official system of accountability. There is no committee that meets to decide whether I have been a sufficiently patient wife, friend, sister, daughter or neighbour. Nobody sends me an annual report explaining how well I have handled the people who have been entrusted to my care. There is no public record of the times I have listened when I could have dismissed someone, apologized when I would rather have defended myself, offered kindness when I was irritated, or chosen to remain silent when saying something sharp would have made me feel better.

There is also no public record of the opposite. No one keeps a file on the phone calls I didn't make, the apologies I postponed, the resentment I allowed to grow, the person I judged without knowing the whole story, or the moments when I knew I should have been kinder and chose not to be. These things can disappear almost completely from public view, while still leaving their marks on the people around us.

Hence, I find myself wondering whether the most important forms of accountability are actually the ones nobody sees.

We often think of accountability as something imposed from outside. A law tells us what we cannot do. An employer evaluates our work. A court determines whether we have broken a rule. A public audience decides whether it approves of our behaviour. But there is another kind of accountability that is much quieter. It comes from the recognition that the choices we make are shaping a life, and that the way we treat other people is shaping them as well as ourselves.

I think most of us know this intuitively. We know that a child remembers the tone of a parent's voice long after the actual words have been forgotten. We know that a marriage can be weakened not by one dramatic betrayal but by years of small dismissals. We know that friendships can disappear because neither person was willing to make the first move toward reconciliation. We know that someone can carry a careless remark for decades while the person who made it has completely forgotten saying it. We also know the opposite: that a kind word at exactly the right moment can stay with someone for years, sometimes changing the way they see themselves.

None of these things are likely to become news. Yet they may be far more significant to the actual people involved than many of the public controversies that occupy our attention.

This makes me wonder whether accountability is really about punishment at all. I believe, at its deepest level, it is about acknowledging that our lives have moral weight. What I do matters because other people are real. Their dignity is real. Their pain is real. Their trust is real. If I have been given someone's love, friendship, loyalty or dependence, then perhaps I have also been given a responsibility. I may not always fulfil it, but I cannot honestly say that it was never mine.

This is where I find the Christian understanding of grace particularly interesting. Grace is sometimes misunderstood as though it means that what we do doesn't really matter because God will simply forgive us anyway. But that doesn't seem to be the idea at all. Grace only makes sense if there is something for which we need forgiveness. Accountability and grace may actually belong together: accountability tells the truth about what we have done, while grace tells us that the truth about our failures does not have to be the end of the story.

That distinction matters to me because there is another danger in thinking about accountability. We can become so conscious of our own failures that accountability turns into shame. We begin to believe that because we have behaved badly, we must therefore be bad people. But there is a difference between taking responsibility and condemning ourselves. One allows us to say, "I did something wrong, and I need to make it right." The other tells us, "I am hopeless, so there is no point trying." The first can lead to repentance and change. The second often leads simply to hiding.

Genuine accountability requires enough humility to admit that we have not always been the people we hoped we were, and enough hope to believe that we can still become different. That seems much more demanding than simply deciding who is at fault.

It is relatively easy to watch a public controversy and ask what another person should have done. It is much harder to sit quietly with the memory of a conversation in which we were unnecessarily cruel, or a relationship we allowed to deteriorate because we were too proud to reach out, and ask what our part was in it. It is harder still to consider that we may have constructed a version of the story in which we were the injured party because that was easier to live with than admitting that we had also caused some of the injury.

And yet, that is where a meaningful life begins: not with the assumption that everything is our fault, but with the willingness to ask honestly what is ours.

We are not responsible for everything that happens to us. We do not choose our childhoods, other people's behaviour, many of the losses that come to us, or the circumstances into which we are born. We cannot control what other people decide to do. But somewhere within those circumstances there remains a field of choice, sometimes larger and sometimes painfully small, in which we decide what kind of person we will be.

We decide whether suffering will make us more compassionate or more bitter. We decide whether being wounded gives us permission to wound others. We decide whether being wronged means that we must remain angry forever. We decide whether we will apologize when we know we have caused harm. We decide whether we will keep defending ourselves after the defence has become more important than the relationship.

And, most importantly, we decide, again and again, whether we will notice the people who are right in front of us.

I find that a more challenging question than asking whether some famous person has lived up to my expectations. I will never know the whole story of a celebrity's life, and I certainly don't know everything that happens behind the decisions that appear in the news. But I do have access to the much smaller and more consequential world of my own choices. I know the people I have loved. I know the people I have disappointed. I know some of the times I have been generous and some of the times I have been selfish. I know the conversations I am glad I had and the ones I wish I could have again.

So perhaps the question isn't really, "Who is accountable?"

It is more like, "What do I believe I am accountable for?"

Am I accountable for the way I speak to the people I love? Am I accountable for what I do with anger? Am I accountable for the trust someone has placed in me? Am I accountable for whether I make amends when I have caused harm? Am I accountable for the opportunities I have been given to do good?

To believe in God means I am ultimately accountable to the One who sees not only what everyone else sees, but the motives, fears, excuses and intentions that are hidden from everyone else.

I don't find that last thought particularly frightening. In some ways, I find it liberating. If God sees the whole story, then perhaps I don't have to spend my life constructing a defence of myself. I can admit that I have been wrong without believing that I am worthless. I can acknowledge that I have hurt someone without deciding that I am beyond repair. I can accept responsibility without taking responsibility for things that were never mine to carry. And I can ask for forgiveness while also trying to become the kind of person who does not keep repeating the same mistakes.

I believe that is what accountability is ultimately meant to accomplish. Not to give us another reason to stand in judgment over one another, but to remind us that our lives have consequences, that other people are affected by our choices, and that we have been given some responsibility for what we do with the little piece of the world that has been placed in our hands.

The public conversation will move on from Ed Sheeran, as it always does. There will be another celebrity, another controversy, another person whose decisions will invite us to decide what he or she should have done. We will probably have opinions. We may even be right about some of them.

But every so often, after we have finished discussing what someone else should have done, let's take time to ask a quieter question of ourselves.

If someone examined my life with the same interest with which I examine the lives of people in the news, what would they find? Not whether I had been perfect. I haven't been. Not whether I had always made the right choice. I haven't.

But would they find someone who was willing to take responsibility when she was wrong? Someone who tried to repair what she had damaged? Someone who recognized that the people around her were not simply supporting characters in her story, but human beings whose lives were being affected by the way she treated them?

I think that is the question I have really been asking all along.

Are we accountable for our lives?

The answer begins with a much simpler recognition: that the life we are living is not happening only to us. We are participating in it. We are making choices within it. We are leaving something behind with the people we encounter.

And someday, whether we answer to God, to our own conscience, to the people who remember us, or simply to the truth about the person we became, the question will not be how well we judged everybody else.

It will be about what we did with the life that was ours to live.