Respect

A few weeks before he was elected pope, Cardinal Ratzinger said at the funeral of Luigi Giussani, founder of the renewal movement known as Communion and liberation, “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story, an event.”

At the heart of Christianity is Jesus’ commandment of love – “love one another as I have loved you”. Putting this commandment into action every day, as we are expected to do requires of us a deep respect for human life and indeed for all of God’s creations. Respect for one another as human beings is essential if any of the other Gospel values we claim to live by are to be allowed to flourish.

This respect we speak of cannot be some sort of ethereal act of being nice to people when we choose to be. This respect requires that we choose to empathise with every person we come into contact with. This respect requires that we can put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and appreciate how they feel. This is a tall order but there are ways by which we can train ourselves to be better at respecting others.

Day in and day out, situations arise where we have the opportunity to either uplift people or to put them down. When we choose each time to lift people up and make them feel good about themselves, make them feel appreciated, make them feel loved, we are exercising our respect for other people, our love of one another.

We are all the less for those times when someone makes a snide remark to a friend about another person’s short-comings, or makes some insidious comment about someone out loud at a gathering or meeting, or uses someone’s mistake or misfortune as a source public amusement. We can easily laugh such happenings off as a joke, as some light-hearted fun. Do we ever stop to think what gives us the right to make such a comment? Do we ever stop to think about how that person would feel if or when they hear these remarks? Do we care? We should. In fact, there is something very hard-hearted and wrong about us if we don’t. The whole community loses a little bit of vitality, a little bit of energy, a little bit of goodness every time someone utters a needless negative about another human being.

People have faults. People do stupid things. People make mistakes. People have arguments and fights with one another. People sometimes need to be “told” or disciplined or dressed down. I am not suggesting that we can eliminate these things. They are all part of the human condition. I am suggesting that we can eliminate those unnecessary, negative, banal and often churlish comments that pop out the instant the thought comes into our heads. I am suggesting we can eliminate entirely the “put-downs” and the “belittling” and the “verbal bullying” that sometimes occurs in every community. It is unhealthy, unchristian and unnecessary. A smidgin of self-control and a pinch of empathy is all it takes!

What a wonderful place our world would be if we all chose to actively show our respect and love for one another every day.