17/10/2018

Good Morning

I was at a funeral some time ago and after the church formalities and burial, seventy people or so were reminiscing passionately in the pub about the deceased. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved him to bits, but he never bought a round,” said one. “With great respect,” said another, ”that’s nonsense. He was generous to a fault.” For a moment I thought this was just a blatant contradiction, but I came to see in deeper conversations about our friend who had passed away, that he was indeed complex and varied in his dealings with others. Both of these statements could indeed be true, depending on who was speaking and what their experiences had been.

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” says Matthew’s gospel. How many of us can rise above our own subjectivity and see into a person’s heart? I’m in now in my late fifties and I increasingly doubt whether I really even know myself. In a recent novel, the writer Julian Barnes had one of his characters pondering this theme of self-knowledge:

“ .. the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around us to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but- mainly- to ourselves.”

Dear God, next time we feel the urge to bad mouth others, something we rarely do to their faces, give us the grace to pause and put the brakes on. In this life, we can never know the full picture. It is only YOU who can see us and hold us in our innermost being. Give us the grace of wisdom in our dealings with others.
AMEN.