Teacher and Lord by John Bartunek

Author:John Bartunek [Bartunek, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984921338
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

CONFERENCE Christlike Love in Our Words

INTRODUCTION “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). That is Christ’s New Commandment, his Last Supper gift to the Church, to all of us, that allows us to become coredeemers with him, to be his partners in the extension of his Kingdom to every corner of our own lives, and to every corner of this beautiful, fallen world. With his grace at work in us, our choices to love as Christ loved truly can be the catalyst for growth in holiness, happiness, and supernatural fruitfulness day by day.

Many of the ways we express this love—the works of mercy, as Catholic spirituality traditionally calls them— are not available to us every single day. We can bury the dead and visit the sick only occasionally, for example. But there is something that all of us do every day that, if we want, can become a constant expression of Christlike love: talk.

We talk every day, all the time. We talk with our voices, and we also talk with the words we put in our text messages, emails, and social media interventions. We are constantly communicating with words. But how often do we recognize in this flow of talk a chance to love like Christ? This Conference is an attempt to help us recognize it, and take advantage of it, all the time.

THE POWER OF THE TONGUE In the New Testament Letter of St. James, the Scriptures dramatically highlight speech, human communication, as a privileged sphere of Christian activity and virtue. In James, Chapter 3, we read:

A … [W]e all fall short in many respects. If anyone does not fall short in speech, he is a perfect man, able to bridle his whole body also. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we also guide their whole bodies. It is the same with ships: even though they are so large and driven by fierce winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot’s inclination wishes. In the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretensions.

—James 3:2–5 These are vivid images about how the power of our words—the tongue, in St. James’s vocabulary—can influence our lives and the lives of those around us. But he doesn’t stop there. In the next few verses, he continues with even more vivid and attention-grabbing comparisons. He writes:

A Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who are made in the likeness of God.

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