What is the easier thing for you to do — tell the truth or please people with half-truths or lies? - Daily Reflections October 3,2014

POPULARITY OR TRUTH?

 

We preachers are sometimes bugged by the so-called “chronic niceness” syndrome. We occasionally get carried away by the pull of political correctness. And not a few of us feel the pressure of the popular expectation that we should always focus on the positive and to “let sleeping dogs lie,” figuratively speaking.

       Truth to tell, the temptation to do so is ever present. Who wants to talk to an audience where individuals raise their eyebrows just as soon as you open your mouth? Who wants to go on “telling them like it is” and face the disapproving looks of the very people who invited you in the first place?

       Every public speaker knows this — without audience sympathy, it is an uphill climb for the speaker. But experts tell us that, in the desire to get precisely that much-coveted audience sympathy, speakers resort to antics and ruses that ironically blow it away — things like apologizing, pinning the blame on the traffic, confessing one’s unpreparedness or lack of preparation time, and the like. Such ruses succeed in showing one and only one thing: the speaker’s position of weakness!

       I read no such weakness on the part of the Lord today. No dancing palsy-walsy with people’s expectations. No attempt to sugarcoat what is basically a hurtful, though liberating, truth.

       The Lord tells them like it is, and how! He minced no words with regard to Chorazin and Bethsaida, which showed no audience sympathy of any kind at all. They saw and heard all the beautiful, marvelous things — the mighty deeds, as the Lord called them. But they wouldn’t listen. They simply wouldn’t care.

       It is hard to be a preacher and a priest now. I saw it firsthand when we took an unpopular stand about the sanctity of life two years ago. Those of us who did were called all sorts of names.

       The temptation remains. Is it popularity or truth? Fr. Chito Dimaranan, SDB

 

REFLECTION QUESTION: What is the easier thing for you to do — tell the truth or please people with half-truths or lies?

 

Grant me, Lord, the courage to always speak the truth even at the risk of being unpopular or rejected by people.