The eCrozier

The New Yorker cartoon below is just too funny, but it also strikes me as unrealistic. I don’t think it’s unrealistic that someone would actually keep a scrapbook of “pastinjustices and imagined slights.” I don’t know anyone who, in fact, does, but I do know people who live their lives as if they would. They seem to hold on to resentments and grievances for years. I had a man in one of my former parishes who expected a priest to bring the Sacrament to him in his home weekly. He had not attended our Sunday Eucharist in over 20 years, because a “hornet” (his chosen term for a particular woman) had given him a “stinging” look one Sunday in the 1970s.

So, for me it’s quite plausible that such scrapbooking would take place. But what seems unrealistic to me is that a person like that would have someone to talk to on the phone. Anyone holding on to such grievances would have a hard time retaining any meaningful relationships. As the old saying goes, it’s like drinking poison, expecting the other person to die.

A team of researchers at San Diego State University recently collated the use of the words “I” and “me” in hundreds of thousands of fiction and nonfiction American books between the years 1960 and 2008. They found that the use of these two words increased 42% during that time while the use of the words “we” and “us” declined by 10%. These changes in word usage parallel the rising level of individualism in American culture.

Our growing individualism as a culture has led to our greater isolation and a diminished ability to experience empathy for the sins of others. Rather than seeing the capacity for other’s sins, shortcomings, and faults in ourselves, we can tend to absolve ourselves of such things all the while retaining judgment on others. Late into the night we can keep a precise score of how we’ve been wronged by others and yet conveniently never keeping score of how we have wronged others. Psy­chologists call this “splitting.”

This week we mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. To me, the most remarkable quality of Dr. King’s speech then (and of his entire ministry) was his persistent effort not to hold onto poisonous resentments. If anyone would’ve been justified in doing so, it was Dr. King. But he steadfastly didn’t. He believed the Gospel of Jesus. We have to forgive the sins against us if we’re ever to live into the very nature of God defined by the cross of His Son Jesus. When we truly do so, we not only experience freedom for ourselves, we create an environment for others to be liberated as well.

+Scott