Almost twenty years ago, I met a man named Gabe. A Catholic by rearing, Gabe had attended some kind of a Pentecostal meeting and experienced Jesus healing him of a chronic back problem. As Gabe told the story, after this healing experience he went to his priest to tell him what had happened, and found a chilly reception. Whether it was skepticism about the healing or concerns about where it happened or plain lack of connection or human interest shown, I don't precisely remember. But Gabe walked away from the Church because of this sense that his experience of Jesus and his experience of the Church were diametrically opposed. Could anyone blame him, especially considering that he was likely hearing from his new spiritual context that the Catholic Church had nothing but evil to offer him?
This was a odd scrap of a memory to float into my consciousness today; I hadn't thought about Gabe in years. And I do pray that he has since found reconciliation with the Church.
What a lesson we can take from his experience: Charity requires us to accept people's experience of the Divine, even when it makes us uncomfortable or there is blatant error intermixed. All of our experiences, to some degree or another, will require some dusting off, some cleaning up (or some major overhauls) in terms of how our minds extrapolate truth from them, how we come to understanding of what has occurred, especially when we encounter Christ. None of that tends to stop God from acting. If I want any hope of being part of the process of discerning with another vulnerable person, I'd better have the charity to listen, to accept, and to praise God with him/her for what He has done. Otherwise I might just be rejecting Jesus on the grounds of not being orthodox enough for me.
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