Today's gospel reading was from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells his followers that it's not enough not to murder, that if they are angry with a brother or sister, or insult someone, they are as guilty as if they had killed that person. He adds that refraining from adultery means not just staying out of beds you don't belong in, but not indulging in lustful thoughts about someone who is not your spouse/partner.
He's telling people they must follow not just the letter of the commandments, but the spirit. After all, if you stop short of killing someone but you still hate them or treat them badly, that is not really acting the way God wants us to act.
Elsewhere, Jesus neatly sums this up when he says the greatest commandment is to "love God with all your strength, all your soul and all your might" and the second-greatest is to "love you neighbor as yourself." If we truly love someone, we will not usually treat them with disrespect or do things to harm them. Sure, we may sometimes say hurtful things to people we love, but later we apologize and make up with them.
But it is so hard to catch ourselves in the heat of the moment and not say the hurtful thing, or not do that which might be gratifying in the moment, but could lead to years of regret. Big things and small, every day, we do and say things that are not loving to others -- that is, not in their best interest.
And it is a fact of the subjective nature of our reality that we really can't help doing and saying some hurtful things -- we can only try to reduce the number of such things and to repair the damage for those we recognize after the fact.
I am comforted by the idea that even my wanting to do right, to act in a loving way, matters. That even if I mess up a lot -- and I do -- the fact that I care about how I affect others, and want to do better makes some difference.
Another comforting thought is that God can use even my mess-ups and mistakes to bring about something good. God is the essence of creativity, and uses all the material to hand -- much of which is human fallibility, evil, misjudgment, etc. to bring creation back to its original state of perfection.
i think it is through wanting to do better that we learn from our mistakes, that we allow ourselves to examine them. i spent many years berating myself for my errors instead of opening myself to them. for me, anyway, the opening was the product of a desire to do better, to be better. this is not to say that i don't still feel threatened and defensive when i err sometimes, because i certainly do, but rather that i will usually come to a place of self-forgiveness that allows me to treat my errors more tenderly and eases my ability to remedy them and see more clearly.
ReplyDeleteyou write such lovely and thought provoking posts. looking forward to the next one.
xo
rachel