Friday of the First Week of Lent 2011

Trash strewn by a bridge
in Iroquois Park
after the recent flood. 

But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother

will be liable to judgment,
and whoever says to his brother, Raqa, 
will be answerable to the Sanhedrin,
and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.

Recently, I finished Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life  by Marshall B Rosenberg, Ph.D. Dr Rosenberg has dedicated his life to helping people recognize and appreciate the confrontation that is often laced into our address to others. With his writings and workshops he teaches more effective, less violent ways of signaling our needs, appreciating the needs of others, and addressing them.

Jesus gives us a similar lesson, perhaps more bluntly, in today’s gospel. His method is to accentuate the violence of words like Raqa and you fool with a more violent, apparently disproportionate, response. Is calling someone a fool really that bad?

Yes, it is that bad. Words have a way of clinging to people like flypaper in an old fashioned burlesque routine. The more we try to shake them off, the more they cling. The more they cling the more they hurt, and the hurt inevitably spills onto others as the violence flows from one victim to another.

Speaking for myself I remember insulting and untrue remarks that were made about my intelligence fifty years ago. I didn’t know they were not true; I didn’t know they were not intended to be taken seriously. I was astonished a few years ago when a psychologist administered an intelligence test and gave me the results. I had no idea….

Many victims report the verbal abuse hurts more than the physical punishment. An insulting word sinks into consciousness like the broken tip of a barbed shaft, working its way deeper into the flesh until it finds vital organs and fatally penetrates them.

It takes more courage, cleverness, foresight, imagination and grace to honor the Godlikeness of every person. In difficult circumstances, when I am disappointed or conflicted, I have to be calm within myself; committed to speaking with charity and clarity; prepared to hear another point of view, respectful of the person before me, and reverent toward my own personhood. I must, as the Prayer of Saint Francis teaches, seek not so much to be understood as to understand.

All too often we have engaged in conversation not to discover the mystery and beauty of the other human being as to reveal “the truth” that other (apparently) does not see. But the truth does not appear amid violent conversations. It withdraws and hides, terrified.

T.S. Eliot concludes his poem, Preludes with:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images and cling,

The notion of some infinitely gentle,

Infinitely suffering thing.

During Lent we pray that we might be found worthy at Easter to see and hear and know the infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering mercy of God.