Hope in the Time of Corona

Back in January of 1970 -- for those of us old enough to remember -- Joe South and the Believers released a hit song entitled Walk a Mile in My Shoes.

Well, I may be  

I wonder if that was one of the things the Lord was asking of the accusers in the familiar story we will hear in next Sunday’s Gospel, with its well-known accusation: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery … So what do you say?” And we all know the reply: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

The Ordo invites us to reflect upon “[the Lord] who challenges us to examine our own hearts before self-righteously judging others.”

Judging others of what? Adultery? No. Not that, something much more than that. How quick am I to hold others in the prison of my judgement, denying them the freedom to be fully who they are – to be fully alive, the singular possessors of their own story with its myriad wounds and scars, disappointments, failures and limitations, successes and joys! It’s easy for me to say: “I’ll never forget what you did to me, and I will never allow you to forget it either!”

Yet, Isaiah writes: “Remember not the things of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!” And Paul declares: “Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead.”

So what “lies ahead”? Paul says that it is the “pursuit [for perfect] maturity … in [the] hope that I may possess it …” Perfect maturity? What is that?

It is allowing others their due. It is to respect the other. Respect: re (again) + spectare (to look at) = to look again. It is to have the maturity to look at another again in an effort to unpackage the real story of who they are and of why they are what they have become.

In our rush to judgment, is it just possible that we are actually judging ourselves, too? Is it possible that my self-righteousness is based upon my inability to respect my own story, a story that unites me intimately, inextricably with yours?

There is hope in this, isn’t there? It is the hope born of our common humanity that wishes not to live in the anguish of the past but rather in a tomorrow that is one of accord, harmony, and genuine human freedom.

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