To criticize others is almost always a negative thing; the so called “constructive criticism” is nothing more than an opportunity, unconscious and subvert, to rebuke and humiliate someone while exalting ourselves; in fact, whenever we demean someone we exalt ourselves, and whenever we praise ourselves we demean someone. There is an implicit humiliation in all exaltations.
The one in contradiction with you could be a great friend, deliver yourself from those who always agree with you. (António Aleixo)
What distinguishes a negative criticism from a positive one is the proven friendship that we have with the person whom we criticize. We only have the “right” to criticize someone we love and whose values we recognize. And even then, the criticism can only come after an affirmation of those merits. So if we neither recognize nor affirm them in that person, we have no right to criticize him or her, and if we still choose to do so, the criticism will most probably be negative.
The general psychosis of our days
Without self-consciousness we do not know ourselves, and without self-criticism there is neither personal growth nor progress. As it has been said above, if on the one hand, it is almost always negative to criticize others, then on the other hand, it is almost always positive to criticize oneself. What we are and what we ought to be are never the same; it is the awareness of this reality that impels us to grow and to progress in life.
“Love is like the moon, when it is not increasing in brightness and size, it is decreasing” – Placed on a moving planet, we must be aware that at the physical level nothing in the reality that surrounds us and what forms our being is static. The same happens at the spiritual and moral level. When we are not striving to be better, we will decline and become worse and worse
To live is like flying in an airplane; without the thrust of the engines to maintain the altitude or to climb higher, we inevitably descend; there is no inertia or a law of gravity to propel us upwards, for it always pushes us downwards. Automatically, without effort and without consciousness, we always do what our animal nature dictates to us through instincts, which is almost always bad both at the personal as well as at the social level.
The death of conscience
For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him. (…) Herod on his birthday gave a banquet (...). When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish (…) ‘I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.’ (Mk. 6:18-25)
He who does not live the way he thinks, ends up thinking the way he lives – Whoever, despite the effort to be better, fails to adapt his life, his actions and his behaviour to the dictates of his moral conscience, will end up adjusting his moral conscience to the reality of his life, and thus justifying and rationalizing his actions and behaviour.
In order to preserve the person’s mental health, the battle cannot continue indefinitely. Too much time spent on indecisiveness will drive the individual to neurosis; he either adapts his way of living to his moral values, or adapts his moral values to his way of living. Whoever cannot adapt his life to his way of thinking will end up adapting his way of thinking to his way of life, thus killing his moral conscience.
The story of the execution of John the Baptist can serve as a parable to illustrate or exemplify the death of Herod’s moral conscience. Herod acknowledged that John the Baptist was right, that taking and living with his brother’s wife was morally wrong. John was Herod’s moral conscience that could speak but could not act and therefore was imprisoned. Herod liked to listen to the truth but lacked the will to put it into practice; hence he went about his life without deciding until the circumstances of life decided for him.
Collective psychosis
The death of moral conscience, which regulates our life and guides and judges our everyday acts, leads to psychosis. A psychotic is a cold and cruel person without feelings, and who can hurt or be a bystander to the sufferings of others without compassion; in severe cases, a psychotic can escalate to torture and kill without the least sense of guilt or remorse. The lack of an accusatory moral conscience, common in many people today, could be diagnosed as a chronic collective psychosis.
‘I have no sins’, this is what we hear in the confessional nowadays. Because our lives are focused on the distant, and not on the near, we see the speck in our neighbour’s eye and not the log that is in our own. Our conscience, which distinguishes us from the rest of the living beings that inhabit this planet, and which is the result of an evolution that lasted five million years, is not always there to help us. Much of our behaviour, what we say, what we do and even much of what we think, work independently of our will, that is, we live on auto-pilot for the most part throughout our day.
Two friends upon meeting after some time without seeing each other, said one to the other, “I was told that you sold your old car to our friend Anthony for an exorbitant price, the car was worth much less than what you had asked for, you cheated the poor man”. “I cheated no one, what I did was a good business deal,” answered the seller. Saddened, and shaking his head in disapproval, his friend said, “I see… But I know that you are a practicing Catholic, when you kneel for a confession, what do you tell the priest?” “To the priest,” the seller said, “I tell him my sins not my business transactions.”
“You just sprayed sulphur on those cabbages yesterday and it looks like you are going to sell them already, should you not wait because it is dangerous? “Don’t worry” said the farmer, “I am not the one who is going to be eating them” – In our world the personal or collective profit is a principle that is placed above all else including the wellness of the public. This man may not eat these cabbages, but he does consume other agricultural produce that are grown and treated in the same manner just like the food that is produced industrially. When profit is placed above the health of the public no one wins; everybody loses.
The same is true of tax evasion, a sin that in my thirty-one year of priesthood I have never heard anyone mention in the confessional. Apparently or in the short term, whoever evades wins, keeping more money in his pockets, but in reality or in the long term, everybody loses, the evader included.
The sacrament of self-examination
The sacrament of penance, or confession, is in itself an exercise of self-examination. Only few people use it and of those who do, many do it out of routine or to observe the precept of the Church that exhorts Catholics to confess and receive the Holy Communion at least once a year during the Easter season. This is not done, therefore, out of necessity or for spiritual growth, but out of obligation.
And because it is done out of obligation and routine, when the penitents kneel in front of the confessor, they do not know what to say and resort to reciting a long-winded and often repeated list: to kill I did not kill, to steal I did not steal etc. For as hard as I try to scrutinize, without having the morbid curiosity of certain old confessors, I cannot decipher any personal sins and oftentimes what I hear are the sins of others, of the husband, the children, the in-laws and daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law etc.; how many times I had to stop the penitent from rambling on and remind him or her that I cannot forgive the sins of others but only his or her own…
I compare our moral consciousness to the sieves that were once used to sift and purify flour, by removing impurities which were the bran used to feed the hens, leaving behind the white flour used for baking. The finer and smaller the mesh size of the sieves, the purer and whiter the resulting flour.
The moral consciences of many people nowadays are too lax; the mesh of their “sieves” is too course, or so filled with holes that the sifting action lets everything pass through thus retaining no impurities. It is therefore not true that they have not committed any sins because they have, but they are unaware of doing so because their conscience did not accuse them nor did it retain the sins. The righteous, says the Bible, sin seven times a day; seven being the perfect number meaning that one sins many times. So if a righteous person sees himself as a sinner, then who are we to say that we are not…
To drown in guilt like Judas
In the antipodes of the lax conscience, lie the scrupulous conscience; the one that cannot free itself from guilt.
One day a woman went to her parish priest and revealed to him that God often appeared to her. The incredulous pastor, in order to confirm the truthfulness of these apparitions or ironically to be amused at the expense of the lady, gave her permission to ask God to tell her his sins, thinking to himself, only God knows my sins, and if she tells me some of them then I will have to believe in these apparitions. The lady, taking seriously the proposal of the pastor without realizing the irony, went home. After few days have passed she came back to see the priest, the latter with an air of mockery asked, “So did God come back and reappear to you?” “Yes He did, Father,” she answered. “And did you ask Him about my sins?” “Indeed I did, Father,” she said. “And so what did God say?” inquired the priest. “With respect to your sins, Father, God told me that He had already forgotten them.”
There is no misery that is greater than the Divine Mercy. God forgives us and forgets, He turns the page which is something that we do not do easily. God knows us better than we know ourselves, loves us more than we love ourselves, and even in cases of healthy self-esteem, He also forgives us much more readily than we forgive ourselves.
At the end of a fratricide war between the Hindus and the Muslims, during the independence process of India, a Hindu went to Gandhi to see if he could help him get rid of his guilt. He told the story of how one day, during the war, he entered the house of a Muslim family where he saw a Muslim woman breastfeeding her baby, he snatched the baby from the mother’s arms and hurled it against the walls. The image of the baby smashed against the wall with its blood flowing out, he said, “follows me wherever I go, I am living in hell…” Gandhi, to help him rid of his guilt, proposed that he adopts a Muslim baby, from the many that were left orphaned by the war, and to bring him up in the Muslim faith.
In my thirty-one of ministry, there have been quite a few women eighty plus years of age who are still confessing obsessively, again and again, the abortion that they had committed when they were teenagers. The scrupulous believe more in a vengeful God, the human way, than in a God of love. It is an offense against God not to believe in His pardon, when God can do nothing else…
…erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. (Col. 2:14)
God forgives and forgets, as St. Paul suggests, He destroys the invoice of our debt so not to be reminded of it; it is us who by our nature cannot forgive nor forget. The purgatory, of which the Bible does not speak directly, was created by God not because He needs us to expiate our guilt, but because we need to atone for our own guilt.
To recognize and to cry over the mistake like Peter
(Before the miraculous catch of fish) when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ (Lk. 5:8)
“In medio vírtus” – Between the two extremes, the lax and the scrupulous moral conscience, stands out Peter’s moral conscience, which is neither lax nor scrupulous. Peter has before God the right attitude that all sinners should have; he acknowledges his own sinfulness by seeing the power of God manifested in Jesus Christ with respect to the miraculous catch of fish.
The episode of the miraculous catch proves that it was not the denial of the Master, a sin equivalent to the betrayal of Judas, which gave Peter the consciousness of being a sinner; Peter always had the awareness that before God there is no one who is not a sinner.
In conclusion, since what we are and what we are called to be never match, a life that is not routinely examined, as the Greek philosopher Socrates says, is not worth living; therefore, we can only improve and grow as persons through self-knowledge, that is, to know what is wrong with our own selves. Just like the way a GPS operates, we can only know the road to where we want to go after knowing where we are at the present moment of our journey; as well as in medicine, we cannot be cured of a disease that has not yet been diagnosed.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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