Slander, Justice, and Freedom

This morning as I was talking with the Lord I was reading Mark 7, where He is interacting with Pharisees. Verse 2 sets up where the difficulties start: "they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled..." You can feel how this observation quickly turned into a judgment of Jesus, as in verse 5 they ask him, "why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?"

Jesus had inconsistency in his camp. Some washed, some didn't. Maybe the some who did were mindful of the tradition; maybe it was culturally engrained. Maybe those who didn't were unschooled in the ceremonial practices, or maybe they omitted it intentionally. We don't get any of that commentary. What, to the Pharisees, reflects back on Jesus is that He did not spend enough time enforcing the traditions, or He was not a careful enough rabbi to eliminate from his midst those who weren't doing it right, or simply this slipshod performance did not trouble Him. Clearly, He was either a lousy rabbi or a rebel. This is clear because they were their own standard of righteousness.

Jesus then proceeds to rip into them. From the text, I observe a few things.

First, He quotes Scripture against them (v. 6-7) to point out their hearts are far away, their worship is empty, and they teach human ideas. 

Second, the text is suggesting this was an ongoing exchange, not simply one conversation. Verse 9 says, "And he said to them," and again in verse 14 "And he called the people to him again and said to them." It sounds to me like Jesus often circled back to this theme when he talked with Pharisees and Mark is condensing Jesus' response in this account. I'm no scholar. But what I see in the paragraph begun by verse 9 ("you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God..." -- reminds me of Daniel 13 when Daniel is interviewing the two lying letchers who were accusing Susanna, "your fine lie has cost you your head") is that Jesus here is recounting for the Pharisees a detailed example of how they teach human ideas as doctrines of God. To me, this reveals He has spent time meditating on this, interceding with the Father for these wayward men. He is intimately familiar with their hearts, their words, and their deeds. This intimate familiarity is diametrically opposed to tribalism, where separatism rules.

As Jesus teaches his disciples about this exchange, he tries to help them arrive at the understanding which he says the Pharisees lack. And what caught my heart was in verse 22, where Jesus is listing the things which defile, and among these he includes slander. 

My Gen X heart stopped and did a little sideways glance around. Slander? As in, saying something publicly about someone else's behavior that makes them look bad? Ok, Lord. I just got done reading you ripping into the Pharisees and giving that group pretty much a bad name for the last 2,000 years, but I know that that wasn't slander, and that you are actually differentiating slander as a different thing.

This hits a real sore spot in my soul, one that I know needs healing and strengthening. My head knows that slander involves saying something that isn't true. Let's do some dictionary and catechsim definitions here.

slan·der

/ˈslandər/

noun

Law

1. the action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person's reputation.

CCC2477: Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likelyl to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:

--    of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;

--    of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to person who did not know them;

--    of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.

1. Another good Catechism quote is paragraph 2479: "Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one's neighbor. Honor is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation and to respect."

I'll be honest. I have always struggled with saying anything about another person to a third party, even when there is no real question of slander involved. I am certain this came from some confusing childhood circumstances which followed me into adulthood, both when I simply couldn't understand what was going on, and when my attempts to speak or ask questions were met with explicit or implicit demands of secrecy and "we don't talk about this." Or, I simply knew that exposing the truth of my pain would really rattle others in my life, which led me to keep silent about what was happening in me, to make it easier for someone else.

This was deeply formative for me, and not in a good way. I took in that revealing truth was in fact slander and it dishonored people I should honor. My deformation never stopped me from mentally creating a class of people* I felt didn't deserve my honor, and whom I could scapegoat to make me feel better. And of course nothing reminds me of that as much as our political atmosphere in an election year.

Nothing could be further from what Jesus was doing with the Pharisees and his disciples. Jesus was in fact confronting the intimate places in his personal culture that people had skirted away from out of fear: the hypocritical power of religious leaders. I'm sure there were folks who thought it was much wiser to just go along and get along. But Jesus spoke right into the heart of dysfunction with the hopes of change and of pulling people out from under the wreckage that already existed. We do too talk about this might have been his exact attitude. And this is not slander. It is justice. No longer will those who do harm find protection, and those who are wise will gain instruction. 

To me, this shows the difference between learning to pattern my life on Jesus Christ, and learning to be nice. Learning how to show honor starts in a heart where identity and truth are clearly understood.

Oh Lord, conform and transform my heart unto Thine. With St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, make me into a supplemental humanity for You through whom You may live again in this world.

*Generally, this class of people consisted of anyone who did not remind me enough of myself.

The Urgency and Simplicity of Love

It seems that the Lord enjoys inviting me to go spelunking with Him. I am one of those people who, if an invitation seems too good, like too much fun, I panic and turn it down, thinking surely if I enjoy it, there must be something wrong with it. I'm silly, I know. 

This morning as I was reading, something caught my attention, and it feels like a spelunking invitation, so I'm here for it.

I was reading Temptation and Discernment by Segundo Galilea, and the section that caught my attention was from Part III, The Demons of Prayer, under the heading "Not Being Sufficiently Motivated." The author says that this distraction is all about being primarily motivated by felt need, whether emotional  psychological. Then, the part that caught my attention: "Above all... the ultimate, persisten motivation for prayer and its solid foundation is the conviction that God loves us and offers us the gift of liberating friendship. If this truth of faith does not genuinely persuade us, our motives will remain shallow... (p. 48, bold in the original).

When I read this, I immediately saw myself as an intense 20-something, sitting in my apartment in Milwaukee, interiorly clawing myself something fierce. I desired God. I had the example of my charismatic fellowship which taught me to throw myself whole hog into studying the Bible and pouring out my soul, keen to confront every painful, broken thing in me. I had a collection of books dealing with "healing the inner man" which focused a lot of forgiving those who had done us wrong and exposing these hurts to God to fix them. I was in the habit of going to church and crying buckets of tears in those days, because I was aware of lots of pains, past and present. My family felt very broken, and I was verging on desperation for God to "bring me a husband," because I felt certain that having a husband was to experience being loved and having proof that I was worthy of love. 

Ah, what would I say to young Marie if I were to meet her today...

I had some close relationships in those days, and honestly almost all of them netted more pain than good for me. One clear exception was my friend Ann (may she rest in peace) who was my prayer partner. We heard and supported one another, and she was even more interiorly quiet than myself. The others were men, and all of these were fraught with problems. My contribution to these problems I can trace back to one theme that I turned over and over in my mind in those days: I felt that I turned to God for fellowship and hanging out, and I turned to people to find my meaning and stability. In other words, I used God for what people are for, and I used people for what God is for. I did a lot of using, and not a lot of relating. 

I was doing Christianity as hard and as well as I knew how. But I really missed the basics. We had a discipleship class that I took in order to get dunked in the pool at the YMCA (which I later repudiated as a "re-baptism"). I heard it constantly, but I was unable to take it in that the foundation of life is prayer, and the foundation of prayer is that God loves us. And that prayer is receiving the liberating gift of God's friendship. To the best of my ability, I was wanting to give myself to God, but in reality I was terribly bound up in myself. I constantly betrayed and beat myself up verbally and emotionally. 

So, when this book Temptation and Discernment talks about the trap of going to God because of felt needs, I can testify that the danger is real. The enemy knew that my weak point was the desire for the love of a man (a natural good), and that I was not averse to putting a condition on God: if He would "bring me a husband" I would believe He loved me. Until then, I was going to agonize constantly and find reason to doubt whether what He says in Scripture is true.

And you know what? The enemy will use other misguided Christians. There came a point where my pastor at that time, who knew a small drama I was facing with one of the only single young men in the church, delivered what he said was "a word from the Lord" for me about God having a husband for me, and I in my deeply wounded credulity took it as gospel truth and affixed it to literally the first person who sat down next to me, who also happened to be the only other single young man in the church at that time. What ensued was several months, stretching into years, of me learning the very, very hard way the difference between standing on the Word of God and standing on foolishness. It's a long story.

But where sin abounds (and people's pastors mislead out of misguided compassion), grace abounds all the more. In the end, this became part of the grace that brought me into the Catholic Church, and back to the basics of the Incarnation of Christ -- the mindblowing reality that God came to live among us because of love. Because He loves us and wanted to live a human life so that we could share His life. 

When we come to discover and grow in our relationship to God it is so vitally important to be rooted correctly. And correctly, here, means in the conviction of the truth that God is love. The He loves me. That he offers the gift of liberating friendship. Some of us get so entangled with so many other things, and they all seem so dire or so important or so pressing or so distressing. The wounds yell. But when they are silent, and God gets a silent Word in edgewise, it always will be, "I love you."