Being Upfront about Backbiting
By Audrey Stallsmith
Note: Most of this article was written many years ago, much closer to the time of the events mentioned. I put off posting it then just in case a couple of the people involved should stumble across it online and have their feelings hurt. That no longer seems to be a possibility.
One lazy Sunday morning many years ago, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open in church. As I squirmed in my seat and pinched my ear lobes in an attempt to stay alert, I became distantly aware of a voice behind me making harshly critical comments on the sermon. That woke me up.
The voice, I knew, must be "Mary's." (Name changed to protect the guilty!) She had always made it abundantly clear that she disagreed with our pastor on almost every issue. But her original annoyance with him had turned to implacable anger—after he failed to turn up to officiate at her husband’s funeral back in the city where they had lived before moving to our small rural community.
(None of the rest of us could believe that our pastor had deliberately ignored her request in that matter. So we had to conclude that she either had forgotten to ask him or he simply hadn’t heard her. That seemed quite possible, since he could be nearly as inattentive as me at times!)
We admire Mary, as she is one of those elderly ladies who has endured much hardship without allowing it to defeat her. She also has the courage to say things the rest of us would not. At that moment, though, I was highly irritated with her. Since I could hear her comments, who was to say that the pastor couldn't as well?
Was that any way to speak of a man who had just emerged from the hospital after a miraculous recovery from a brain injury that might well have killed him? And what kind of example did it set for the two teenage grandsons she had with her? Might they not get the impression that the only reason to attend church was to criticize?
My righteous indignation received something of a set-back, when I realized Mary was only saying things I often thought myself. All of us had hoped our pastor's recovery might make him a more optimistic sort of person, but that hadn't happened. Since our not-so-subtle hints about his "doom and gloom" style had always fallen on deaf ears, we'd had to resign ourselves to the fact that his melancholy personality wasn't going to change.
Such acceptance didn’t prevent me from censuring his sermons in my head. Granted, I wasn’t rude enough to speak my criticisms aloud, but God can read thoughts. Might Mary's carping commentary be an example of how I sounded to Him? After all, scripture tells us, “Don’t criticize and speak evil of each other, dear brothers. If you do, you will be fighting against God’s law of loving one another.” (James 4:11a)
By the end of that service, I was seriously disgruntled with her, the pastor, myself, and the human race in general. I had come to realize that, as Fulton Sheen points out in Life Is Worth Living, "our judgment of others is a projection of our own weaknesses." In other words, we most dislike in other people the same faults we have ourselves.
Sheen puts it even more implacably in Peace of Soul when he writes that "the increase of fault-finding is in direct ratio to the denial of sin." When we have messed up, after all, we always want the blame deflected onto someone else. That’s probably why I’m always accusing my computer of gross stupidity, though the Dell seldom turns out to be the one at fault.
At least the computer has no feelings to be hurt. When interacting with other people, I need to keep in mind that, as J. B. Phillips points out in God Our Contemporary, "the criterion at the judgment is neither religion, nor orthodoxy, nor respectability, but the way in which man has treated man." We are supposed to forgive other people's faults, rather than harping on them, in hopes that they will do the same for ours.
Consider the case of Major Barbara, a movie based on one of George Bernard Shaw's plays, which has to be one of the most depressing films I have ever seen! In it, an upper-class Salvation Army major becomes disillusioned by what she perceives as her general's "selling out" to wealthy contributors.
In an unrealistic chain of events, Barbara and her fiancé—in turn—sell out to those same materialistic interests. Shaw was a socialist and apparently thought materialism was the only thing that could change the world. But could he really believe that someone who had been involved with the saving of souls would be satisfied with just saving bodies? Or that another character, an abusive drunk, could be redeemed by a new job? If Shaw truly “bought” that, he must have been incredibly naive.
I doubt Barbara would have been as shocked if one of her lower-class converts had let her down, so there is something snobbish in her disillusionment over her superior officer doing so. Perhaps Barbara had never really gotten a good look at her own depravity. She obviously hadn't taken to heart the Christian doctrine that, with one exception, all humans are sinners. So, if we expect perfection from anyone other than Christ, we are going to be disappointed every time.
Even the most admired people in scripture had egregious faults. G. K. Chesterton points out in Charles Dickens "one of the ringing realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men commit grand sins; it makes its great men commit small sins and behave like sneaks."
The more idealistic socialists were disappointed to discover that the supposedly benevolent overseers they put in charge of their "brave new world" didn't remain benevolent for long. Men can only be saved from the inside, and no secular scheme is going to manage that. Even the change of heart involved in salvation doesn't turn men or women into plaster saints.
Rather than harping on how objectionable some of our fellow Christians can be, perhaps we should consider how much worse they—or we—might be without our faith. When reminding us to remember the beam in our own eye before criticizing the speck in our brother's, Christ suggests our own faults are too close and large for us to see them, but often distort the way we perceive others.
Despite that, most of us love the members of our immediate family and tend to treat their shortcomigns with tolerant amusement, because years of forced togetherness have shown us the good as well as the bad in the persons with whom we live. As George MacDonald asserts in Life Essential, "fault is not lovable; it is only the good in which the alien fault dwells that causes it to seem capable of being loved." Helmut Thielicke points out that "Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in the sin something alien."
He goes on to add in Christ and the Meaning of Life that, "as we Christians follow Jesus we receive not only a new heart, but also new eyes. We see the pearl in things." Christianity, as Chesterton asserts in Charles Dickens, "does not think of men as more or less valuable, but of men as all intensely and painfully valuable. . . [because] they bear the image of the King."
When we start seeing the image of God in all other people, we will be well on our way to loving them. If we can do this for members of our immediate family, we should be able to do it for members of our church family, who teach us spiritual lessons we can’t learn on our own.
An idealist like myself often retreats from reality, so I sometimes need melancholy sorts to force me to face up to things as they are. (After all, in the Old Testament, doom and gloom preachers were called prophets!) In lazy and self-centered attempts to avoid confrontation, I’m often less than straightforward about how I really feel. So blunt types like Mary can teach me to be be more honest, though honesty doesn’t actually require us to express every feeling!
In the years since that Sunday morning, the man who was our pastor then was confined to a nursing home due to his health and passed away there last January. Our new minister is much more upbeat. Mary, however, took a casual comment made to her by his wife as a criticism and hasn’t returned to church since.
Our new pastor continued visiting her at home, however. We became aware that her mind was beginning to fail, when she began mistaking him for our former reverend. Fortunately, she no longer seemed to bear any animus toward that prior pastor. Eventually she, too, had to be confined to a nursing home.
Mary has had to endure more hardship than I can imagine, including her own cancer and the loss of her husband, son, and daughter to various illnesses. I suspect she was angry at God over those tragedies but didn’t like to admit that, so she railed at his representatives instead. After the death of her daughter, I remember her saying to me, “How much more of this does He think I can stand?” I didn’t have to ask whom she meant by “He,” but I didn’t have an answer for her either.
Still, I may be way off base in regard to her motivation. Painful though it sounds, we must do a lot of chipping away at the beams in our own eyes before we can see clearly enough to make an accurate assessment of other Christians. Once we do, I suspect we will find their faults quite "speckish" when compared with our own!