A few years back, I was driving from Atlanta to Kansas City—easily a 14 hour drive, and I was doing it all at a stretch. Alone. No biggie, I thought. I’ve done longer. So I was cruising along, fist-pumping out the sunroof to the best parts of my favorite songs (okay, yes, it was Footloose) when disaster struck: Bonnaroo. I started seeing signs telling me to expect Bonnaroo traffic. I honestly thought it was some kind of imported Australian animal, so I called my sister to Google it. Turns out it’s an outdoor music festival—think Woodstock but crunchier.
My sister’s roommate told me to go, but I was too excited about the prospect of reaching the land of barbecue and limeade, so on I went.
Until the traffic hit.
Now I’m from DC—I know from traffic. In high school, I knew at least a dozen different ways to get to school, depending on time of day, weather conditions, and who was in office. Showing up 2 hours late to school was excused if you were stuck in traffic. I literally kept a book in my car for rush hour. So traffic doesn’t generally bother me.
But this was no ordinary traffic. We were stopped. So stopped that some of the Bonnaroo folk were parking their cars, grabbing their…paraphernalia…and walking to the campsite. They were laughing and strumming their guitars and looking all emo and I. Was. Stuck.
The longer I sat there, the more I started to hate them. Those stupid little hippies with their “music” and their “camping” and their “free love.” I gritted my teeth and turned up my mainstream 80s pop music to drown out the folk music I imagined coming from the flower children. As I inched by crowds of androgynous people wearing Birkenstocks and throwing Frisbees, I felt old and angry and self-righteous. Stupid kids and their stupid Bonnaroo.
I was 22.
Finally, after probably 2 hours of crawling, we passed the booming metropolis of Manchester, Tennessee and traffic picked up. After that infuriating fiasco, though, I was low on gas, so I pulled off at the next stop to refuel. And the stupid hippies were there, too! Standing around in their “ripped jeans” with their “shaggy hair” and their stupid unwashed selves, they had the nerve to be getting gas at the very same gas station I was at!!!
Have I mentioned that I get really angry really easily?
I pumped my gas with a vengeance, burning with anger at these people whose fun was literally ruining my road trip when I caught a glimpse of myself in the gas station window.
I was wearing flip flops. And jeans that were more holes than jeans. And a 10 year old t-shirt from an island-themed musical. My hair reached halfway down my back. It had been blowing out the sunroof, so it was huge and frizzy. And unwashed. And held back by a bandanna.
I was one of them—I was one of the hippies! And they were looking at me and smiling. They thought I was their friend! And I was NOT THEIR FRIEND BECAUSE THEY MADE TRAFFIC AND I HATE TRAFFIC!!!!!!
That was when I realized that I was absolutely ridiculous.
“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?” (Mt 7:3)
The trouble is, when I’m angry I don’t generally see people as people, I see them as obstacles. When I’m annoyed at the airport, it’s not at the little old lady shuffling along but at that thing in between me and my gate. When a kid won’t shut his mouth in class, I’m not mad at Ben, I’m mad at something that won’t stop making noise. I reduce people to what they are and ignore who they are, but I get angry when others do the same to me, when they see only the bandanna and the ripped jeans and don’t know that I AM A SERIOUS ADULT WITH VERY IMPORTANT BUSINESS AND NONE OF THIS HIPPIE MUSIC NONSENSE!
But how can I expect people to bear with me, to love me, to see me for who I am if I won’t even try to do the same for them? It’s an obvious problem in a crowd, surrounded by nameless, faceless strangers, or online, when you’re dealing with pixels, not people. And it’s less embarrassing there; I mean, you’d have to be Mother Teresa to love each individual in the world, right?
I think this detachment seeps into the rest of my life as well, though. That crying girl is keeping me from my dinner. If my friend weren’t sick all the time, maybe I’d get to see that movie with her. And it is just so typical of my sister to say something like that!
And here’s where I really struggle. It’s not so much that I depersonalize those closest to me, lumping them in with all the other hippies instead of admiring their unique combination of dreadlocks with tie-dye. It’s that I define those I “love” by my terms. “That kid’s a hippie and isn’t it just typical that he’s smoking a blunt and wandering along with a Frisbee!” I say (figuratively), and that’s my excuse not to love.
You see, the more I can define people by their screw-ups, the angrier their screw-ups make me. If my co-worker is rude to me once, I can ignore it pretty easily. If she’s rude to me every day, pretty soon I’m angry even when she’s polite. If my 2-year-old nephew, refusing to say he’s sorry, says, “I’n seethee!” it’s actually pretty cute the first time. Once he’s said it 35 times in a day, I’m angry at him even before I ask him to apologize.
Dietrich von Hildebrand talks about this in Man and Woman: Love & the Meaning of Intimacy (which, admittedly, I have not read). He says:
A representative mark of genuine love is found where each of the other person’s worthwhile qualities is looked upon as really his, as typical of him. But his shortcomings are presumed to be deviations from his real self. Where something undesirable is apparent, the expression “That’s not like him” is characteristic of love…. Where there is genuine love in response to the person’s beauty as a whole, it is to be expected that his negative traits will not be considered typical…. Love considers everything negative as a deviation.
It seems, then, that patience and real love are choices, not accidents. When we choose to love someone, we choose to view all her faults as atypical. Of course, I’m not saying that you should ignore the fact that your girlfriend criticizes you nonstop or that your boyfriend hits you. I’m saying that when there are relationships we must maintain, the best way to do that is to refuse to brood over injury or rejoice over wrongdoing (1 Cor 13, if you’re keeping track).
Just as people falling in love somehow seem not to see each other’s faults, we can choose not to see each other’s faults. St. Ignatius Loyola once said (I think—the internet doesn’t seem to agree) that we ought to say of every man we meet, “Jesus died for this man.” For me, this is more powerful than trying to see Christ in everyone, because some people just don’t seem much like Christ.* Serial killers, for example, or middle schoolers. But Jesus died for them just the same.
When Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was thinking of me. And he wasn’t thinking, “Oh, it’s just so like her to brag about that. Ugh, she’s always trying to make other people feel small. Oh, now she’s going to get mad about something stupid? How typical!”
When Jesus thinks of me, he sees beyond my sins to the person I was made to be. When we love as he loved, we choose to look beyond people’s flaws and see their true selves. We refuse to be slaves to impatience and anger. We love them as they are, just as we want to be loved. We choose not to define people by their sins—even their constant sins.
Why do we demand to be treated as people when we treat others like things? Why, when we see a splinter in our brother’s eye, do we look down on him instead of trying to help him get it out? Forget about whether or not you’ve got a wooden beam—why do you hate people for their sin instead of trying to love them through it?
We’ve all got someone in our lives whose poor behavior is “just typical.” Maybe your teenage daughter rolls her eyes every time you talk. Maybe your mother asks you the same questions you’ve already answered over and over again. Maybe your wife spends every dinner complaining about her day. Here’s your challenge: refuse to see that flaw as part of that person. Recognize that it’s not okay and choose to move on. Because your daughter is so much more than her bad attitude. And your mother is nosy because she loves you. And your wife is so beautiful and so kind and so tired. You are not your sin. Neither are they theirs. Judge not.
*Although if I’m really being honest I have to admit that if Jesus came today he’d probably be road-tripping to Bonnaroo right now.