IT’S well known that our first or immediate reactions to things we see, hear or experience are not quite right. They can even be totally wrong. We should not be surprised by this fact of life. It’s part of our natural human limitations, not to mention that we have to contend with spiritual and supernatural realities that obviously are way above our usual way of understanding things.
Rather, what we should do is precisely to rectify and purify them by always referring them to what our Christian faith teaches about the proper morality we ought to have as children of God. Our reactions, in the end, should be marked with charity as shown to us by Christ.
In the gospel, many of the characters misjudged Christ as their first reaction upon seeing him. In one instance, for example, a Pharisee who dined with Christ, was critical of him after observing that he did not wash before dinner. (cfr. Lk 11,38)
That was when Christ corrected the Pharisee, saying, “Did not he who made that which is without, make also that which is within?” (Lk 11,40) What he tried to tell the Pharisee was that since God created both the outside and the inside of a person, inner purity is just as important as outer cleanliness. Christ was trying to stress the importance of inner spiritual cleanliness over just outward appearances.
Given the way we are, we should not be surprised when our first reactions are not right. But we should be quick to rectify and purify them. We have to be most careful with our judgments, since it is very easy for us to fall into rash judgments.
We can easily react with traces of pride, envy, lust and other anomalies, like our biases and prejudices, when we see something, for example. Or we would just have these kinds of reactions, albeit usually passing, from time to time. Given our personal weaknesses and the conditions around, that tendency to make rash judgments is always there. We need to be wary of it and do whatever we can to counter it.
The thing to do is to try our best to consider everyone, despite our differences and conflicts, always with charity even before we make some considerations about them. And the basis for this is that from the beginning till the end, we are all brothers and sisters, children of God who are supposed to love everyone even to the extent of offering our lives for them, just like what Christ did.
When we find ourselves, for example, with some critical thoughts about someone, for one reason or another, let us immediately bring that person into our prayer, begging our Lord to grant us the grace to love him despite the sharpest of differences.
We should sustain this prayer until we can really say that we have put off the remaining embers of said critical thoughts and start to feel the sprouting of understanding and charity toward him. There may be an element of tolerance involved here, but of the kind that does not take away the duty to sort out and clarify things, or even make corrections when necessary. Obviously, this has to be done in a very gradual way.
We should try our best that we can live out what St. Paul once said—that we should manage to be all things to all men irrespective of how they are without comprising the ultimate truth which in the end is charity. (cfr. 1 Cor 9,22)
