There is something that happens in almost every family gathering. Somebody arrives late, sits quietly, hardly eats, and leaves early. Before the car has even disappeared from the driveway, the committee begins its investigation. “Something is wrong.” “He looked upset.” “She did not speak to me.” “They must be having problems.” Within ten minutes, people who have no actual information have produced a full documentary, complete with motive, and a conclusion with background music.
Saint Paul says something today that should make all of us slightly less confident: “Who knows what pertains to a person except the spirit of the person that is within?”
As I pondered these readings, the quote “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience” often attributed to Teilhard de Chardin came to my mind. In other words, there is an interior world in every human being that we cannot see from the outside.
We see somebody become quiet and call it arrogance or ignoring us. We see somebody become emotional and call it weakness. We see somebody withdraw and call it indifference. We see somebody impatient and call them rude. Sometimes we are right. And most of the time we are magnificently wrong.
A person may be carrying grief and still come to work. A mother may be exhausted and still prepare dinner. Someone may be fighting a private fear while smiling through an entire conversation. A person may be praying desperately while appearing completely ordinary. Most of the deepest battles in human beings do not come with subtitles.
And then Paul makes the astonishing leap: if even another human being cannot fully know what is happening inside us, how much less can we understand the depths of God without the Spirit of God? That changes how we look at prayer. We often come to God with very confident explanations. “Lord, this is what You should do.” We have diagnosed the problem, designed the solution and invite God mainly for implementation. We even provide a schedule. “Preferably before Friday.”
But prayer is not informing God. Prayer is allowing God to inform us. To receive the Spirit is to become less obsessed with having an explanation for everything. It is to develop reverence for what we do not yet understand: another person’s hidden struggle, our own unfinished story, even the strange ways in which God may be working through disappointment.
Peter looked like the wrong man to lead the church. He spoke before thinking, panicked under pressure and denied Jesus when courage mattered most. Yet Christ saw him as a rock hidden inside the instability. Saul looked like the last person who should become an apostle; he was actively persecuting Christians. Christ saw Paul. The thief beside Jesus looked like a life already wasted. Christ saw someone who could still enter Paradise before sunset.
“The mind of Christ” is not a spiritual superpower that makes us certain about everybody. Quite the opposite. It may make us more humble, more patient, slower to judge and quicker to listen. The mind of Christ is the ability to see beyond the present version of a person.
There are people around us whose behavior makes no sense to us because we know only the visible chapter. God knows the whole book. So before judging someone today, perhaps we should ask one question: What might be happening inside this person that only God can see?