By Jim Tune
The joke was funny. My sermon was good. But two rows of people, mostly from the same family, were unmoved. They were, in their own minds, punishing me for an unpopular decision. The method of punishment? Withholding encouragement. Withholding praise. Withholding kindness. Arms folded across their chests, their eyes betrayed what they were thinking: You will receive no love from us this day.
Praise has never been my motivation for preaching. You can”t please everyone anyway. But most preachers can relate to the “deliberate withholding” scene I just described. Thomas Aquinas once submitted that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding some of the food that he or she needs to live.
The root of this condition is usually resentment or jealousy. Our world is full of resentment. At every level of life, from what we see playing out in the conflicts among nations to the bickering in our boardrooms, classrooms, living rooms, and bedrooms, there is evidence of resentment and bitterness. Everyone, it seems, is bitter about something, and, of course, not without cause. Most of us have nursed the feeling that we have been slighted, ignored, wounded, and have drawn more than our fair share of short straws in life.
Religious philosophers such as Aquinas, Søren Kierkegaard, Robert Bly, and Richard Rohr, among others, tell us the deep roots of our resentment and unhappiness lie in our inabilities to admire, give praise, and give others and the world a simple gaze of grateful admiration.
We believe maturity and sophistication demand cynicism and a reticence to easily admire or easily compliment. Maturity, we believe, requires we pick things apart, be suspicious of others” virtues, distrustful of their motives, on hyper-alert for hypocrisy, and articulate every reason not to admire. Such is the view today.
What we don”t admit in this view of maturity is that we feel threatened by those whose graces or virtues exceed our own. What we don”t admit is our own jealousy. What we don”t admit is how our need to cut down someone else is a certain sign of our own jealousy and poor self-image. Our outlook becomes perennially soured by resentment, cynicism, and jealousy.
We can test ourselves in this: When was the last time you walked across a room and told a person, especially a person whose talents dwarf your own, that you admire her, that you admire what she”s doing, and that her gifts enrich your life? When was the last time you gave someone a sincere compliment?
To withhold encouragement””to neither admire nor praise””is not a sign of sophistication, but of moral immaturity and personal insecurity. I want to be done with emotional stinginess. God help me.
I am not sure when we moved from being thankful to holding our hands out wanting more and never being satisfied. We treat God like some ATM blessing machine and in our twisted minds often find Him wanting. We are not fulfilled and do not possess all that we want. We need to get over ourselves and stop being emotionally, financially and time stingy. God has abundantly blessed us and met our needs over and over again. Forget about ourselves and what we want or feel we deserve. We need to get outside ourselves and help someone who is genuinely having a difficult time. Time for heart and mind renewal.
Well done, Jim Tune, well done! And that’s not even solicited. 🙂
Thanks for the highly motivational quote: “Thomas Aquinas once submitted that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding some of the food that he or she needs to live.”