This week I was mesmerized by the turbulent waters caused by humans on an otherwise smooth and peaceful sheltered bay. It brought a fleeting memory of a song that someone I once knew long ago kept playing over and over and over again, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”. There was no bridge though, and the troubled waters were manmade!
Feeling guilty that I did not attend Mass, I perused some of the readings for today’s services, and came across the sin of “detraction”. Of course, I went down another one of my rabbit holes, because I did not remember this particular sin…gluttony, envy, pride, greed, bearing false witness, etc., etc., yes. But detraction?
In this day and age of living in a society that insists in having the “right to know” everything, the concept of detraction is alien.
The sin of detraction is when we disclose or exaggerate another person’s faults to those who didn’t need to know, and the detraction has been spread deep and wide and you cannot repair it. In other words, contrary to calumny or slander -which involve lies-, detraction is the unjust violation of the good reputation of another by revealing something true about him/her. It uses the truth as a weapon to hurt another person. And one of the worst possible things we can do, is to use detraction to hurt that person in order to justify our own reckless or bad behavior, or shift blame, or seek pity.
Hence the significance of the famous meditation of St. James about the taming of the tongue:
“For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”
Haven’t we all been there at some point? It is correct that the truth shall set you free. And yet, and yet… Food for thought.
Dum Spiro Spero 