Article January 19, 2009 Issue

THE WORLD'S NEED FOR INTEGRITY

JOAN TAYLOR

REPRINTED FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE an avid sports fan to appreciate the particular moves that inspire—and lift us all up higher. The name of the game is honesty.

Late last year, during the second stage of the PGA Tour qualifying tournament in Texas, golfer J. P. Hayes realized he'd played a ball that wasn't the same model he'd used to start his round. He'd violated the "one ball" rule. He easily could have let it go. No one knew and no one would have been the wiser. But he didn't. 'The next day, he realized something else: He hadn't only played the wrong ball, but he'd played a ball from his bag—a prototype—that wasn't approved. No one noticed. He'd only played it for two strokes, and he could have let that one pass, too. Instead, he came clean, which because of the hard and fast rules on the golf circuit, put him out of the running for the year 2009 and potential high-money stakes.

Sometimes we assume that when the stakes are high— whether it be government, politics, sports, high finance, whatever—it's OK for integrity to take a back seat. The opportunity is too big to lose, right? But this is just the time we need to uphold our own, and everyone else's, integrity, because it's a divine quality and an established part of our nature. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the The Christian Science Monitor, put it this way: "Evasion of Truth cripples integrity, and casts thee down from the pinnacle" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 448). The "pinnacle" she referred to is the pinnacle mentioned in the Bible, when the devil tempted Jesus to jump, out of self-will and arrogance, from the top of the temple in Jerusalem (see Luke 4:9). In other words, it's as if a thought whispered, "Go ahead, be less than you actually are."