It's very easy to find fault with things and people. For instance:
- I enjoy an invitation eating with a friend at a Thai restaurant, the menu looked tasty, but the ingredients were not authentic nor well prepared.
- There goes the pastor, complaining that the pews are empty but never offers a sermon about protecting legal immigrants and the poor.
- Everyone extends themselves for their senior neighbor, but the neighbor never says thank you for their help.
- The snow plow driver plows your street but it piles the ice and snow at the end of your driveway.
No
matter how good a person or a thing may be, it is easy to find some fault with
them.
And while it is easy to find faults in others, it is just as easy to overlook
our own faults. Or as Jesus says in the gospel: "We see the speck in
another's eye, but we don't see the log in our own." And notice the
difference, a speck compared to a log. A little fault compared with a
really big one. Why are we like that? Is it because we are naturally jealous?
or envious? or basically negative and critical? and we have lived with
our own faults for so many years that we have grown accustom to them, or
perhaps have never known that we had the problem. We live in a bubble of
misinformation or delusion that we are OK. Really!
Once a disciple came to Socrates
ready to gossip about someone. Socrates stopped him and gave him a “triple
filter test” about what he was going to say. “Are you
sure that what you are going to tell me is true?” The
disciple wasn’t sure. ”Is it good?” No, it
wasn’t. “Is it useful?” He wasn’t sure. Socrates said: “If what
you want to tell me isn’t true, good or even useful, why should I hear it?”
When we are tempted to speak ill of the other, it is good to apply this filter to our thought: “Is what I am going to speak really true, good, and useful?” If any one of the three conditions fails, we better keep our mouth shut, or still better, say a silent prayer for the other.
Today's gospel from
St. Luke follows immediately upon his beautiful explanation of unconditional
love whereby we are to love even our enemies. This kind of love is not
natural. It can come only with the grace of God and as a result of much
work and effort. But this is precisely the challenge of the gospel for
each one of us. To be so positive of all other people that we can accept
them for who and what they are, that we can overcome those occasions when we
tend to misjudge others, that we can stress the good in others and hope they
can do the same for us.
It sounds like a kind of Christian utopia, doesn't it? But Christ came to
change the work, to transform the world according to the will of His
Father. This gospel is a challenge, a bold challenge for each one of us
followers of Jesus.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends give us an appreciative heart so that we may speak only words that build up the other.
