A reflection on Galatians 1:13–24 for Tuesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time.
Being right feels good. I know what I know, holding the best position on the issue, and I know who needs correcting. If someone questions my approach, I can explain it again, a little more slowly. Clearly they missed the point the first time.
Yes, I’ve been that helpful person. Stepping in to correct someone who just doesn’t get it. My family could probably supply examples.
In today’s reading, Paul remembers how fiercely he persecuted the Church. He was devoted to his ancestors’ traditions and determined to defend them. He had time and energy to spare. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. His beliefs drove him to cause terrible harm. Sincerity didn’t make his actions good. But I bet it helped him justify them.
It would be nice if candor counted for more, especially when I mean well and things turn out badly. I hope people will remember my good intentions. Reading Paul’s account, I have to consider what actually happens to people when I act on my convictions. Have I treated them with patience and care? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes I’ve decided they’re in the way and given myself permission to push past them.
Most of us will never persecute the Church as Paul did. We can still make another person’s life difficult and feel pleased with our “faithfulness”. An opinion we repeat about someone’s wrong headed thinking can become the only thing anyone remembers about them. At the parish, I can defend a familiar practice so much that I stop asking whom it helps or leaves out.
And when I decide someone is difficult, I’m really good at looking for and finding proof. If they object to my approach, I label them argumentative. If they are silent, then they’re sulking. It’s a well designed system, and it saves me the trouble of considering whether they have a point.
God’s grace is the start of Paul’s change. Paul speaks of God revealing His Son to him, and he takes up work he had fiercely opposed. He couldn’t have imagined doing that as the person he’d been before. I find that as a wake up call. He was so certain, with no way to see how much he had yet to understand.
The communities Paul visited knew his reputation. Their former persecutor was now preaching the faith he’d tried to destroy, and they praised God. They had to make room for that change, too, and let go of past perceptions. I wonder ifI would have joined their praise. I might have kept a careful list of his previous offenses tucked away in my brain.
Where do I need the humility to reconsider? And whom have I stopped allowing to change?
God, help me notice when my certainty makes me careless with another person. Give me courage to admit when I am wrong, and generosity to welcome the good You are doing in someone I thought I already understood. Amen.
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