WE DO NOT HAVE A CLUE

Sometimes the most foolish words we can utter are, "I know exactly how you feel?" when we really do not have a clue what that person feels. I have always wondered why, at least when my mother was having children, almost all the OB-GYNs were men, males who did not have a clue what mothers were going through except from a textbook understanding. (I know, very few women could get into medical school back then. But you know what I mean.) Or even more personally, when as a new and celibate priest I was giving marriage instructions, I had not the foggiest notion about married love. I didn’t have a clue.

And yet, even when we know we do not have the foggiest understanding what someone else may be going through at the moment, we still think we understand; we still believe we know how they feel. That is bad enough. What is worse is when we make judgments about how they feel ("You should not feel that way") or we make judgments about their present state ("You can change if you really want to").

Men do that with women, and maybe vice versa; the well-off do it with the poor; those blessed with superior intelligence (but usually with less common sense) do it with those less blessed intellectually. The list is endless but the misunderstandings remain across the board. The point is that it does not matter if we do or do not understand how another person feels, why another person is suffering so, why what has happened has happened. All that is really irrelevant.

When Jesus encountered people, he never patronized them by saying that he knew how they felt. He never condemned them for being poor or sick or perhaps even being a drone on society. Jesus always accepted people as they were and ministered to them as they were. He never made as a condition of his help a demand that they change. He hoped they would if they could. But he never condemned or judged.

Even those who were self-professed screw-ups Jesus loved because he knew what we all sometimes seem to forget: that no one is perfect. There may be degrees of imperfection. But differences in degree make no difference. We are all screw-ups, all dysfunctional, to one degree or another. We are all in the same boat.

And Jesus died for all of us because Jesus loves each one of us equally. Of course, I suspect, in his humanity, he might have loved the less-blessed more than the more-blessed. The less-blessed knew the straits they were in and knew that sometimes there was nothing they could do about it. They knew they needed God's help. The more-blessed, however, tended to think they were either the cause of their own blessings or that they deserved them.

It really does not matter that we do not have a clue about what another feels or what is going on in another person's life. What matters is that we care and that we, without judgment, do all we can to minister to the person in that person's time of need, just as others have ministered to us, without judgment, in our time of need.