Wednesday of Week 27 in Ordinary Time (Year II)
Galatians 2:1-2,7-14 | Psalm 116:1-2 | Luke 11:1-4
When I saw they were not respecting the true meaning of the Good News, I said to Cephas in front of everyone, ‘In spite of being a Jew, you live like the pagans and not like the Jews, so you have no right to make the pagans copy Jewish ways.’ (Galatians 2:14)
I deal with several Catholic folks on a liturgical and personal basis, who can be deliberately and painfully blunt to the point of being rude and hurtful. When I ask them why they behave this way, their reply is invariably, “This is what I am, I can’t change.”
It’s awfully tempting to swat them like St. Paul rebuked St. Peter for his hypocrisy, but their targets tend to shrug off such behaviour, and their rudeness seems to be tied to familiarity; they’ve invariably polite with strangers, but with their friends, it’s “hey, idiot!”
More distressingly, I’ve caught myself doing the same thing with a friend of my best friend. We’ve found that she seems to be forever planning what to say next without actually listening to what we’re trying to tell her, so we end up having to rephrase the same message several times until it sinks in, and when she restates what she thinks we said, it often exactly opposes our original message. Achieving a common understanding is usually a vexing exercise, and we’ve lost our temper with her quite often.
It’s the same story with some of my clients, with whom I usually communicate in my less-than-fluent Mandarin. Quite often, I end up struggling to think of the needed phrases, and then I get rather loud when the ones I come up with don’t quite get my point across. Worse, I tend to speed up my words for some reason, which just exacerbates the communications problem.
I’m sure all of us have areas in our lives where we do what actually opposes our conscience, out of a sense of conformity (“better not stick out, otherwise everything will think I’m being holier-than-thou”) or insecurity (“better play ball, boss is looking to fire people”). Perhaps today, we can start looking at one area in our lives that needs some Christian fine-tuning, and make a small but sustainable adjustment, instead of a zealous about-face that we may not be able to keep up in the long term.
After all, as my travelling spiritual director Fr. Paul Staes reminded me in his October 1st homily, “the saints too had their earthly faults, but it didn’t stop them from striving to be better each day.”
In my case, I’ll be looking at breathing more deeply and often when speaking with my clients, in an effort to reduce my heart rate and frustration level. Perhaps I should also try to draw diagrams to better get my point across.
Beyond that…well, let’s take it one day at a time.
Lord, you know we are imperfect beings. Give us the hope that we can be better each day, the determination to work on our holiness, and the patience to take one sustainable step at a time. Amen.