A veritable fertile crescent of bloggings today from the ususal suspects. Flos Carmeli applies hammer to nail when he says about saints: I'm convinced that part of this is because they have become detached from their image of self.
Hard-won distance from self seems often fleeting. Aquinas bluntly said words to the effect that if you care what others think, rather than what God thinks, you are not on the Path. Dorothy Day wrote, God sees Christ, his Son, in us, and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. This again, results in cognitive dissonance for me. Getting it in my skull that God sees Christ, his Son, in me. But that is an absolute prerequisite to loving others, for it is in the experience of unconditional love that one can love unconditionally.
During my time of separation from the Church I was not only more lenient with self but more lenient with others. It is natural (that is to say not supernatural), since when one is getting away with something, one wishes and hopes the same for others. If one is withholding something from self, natch he will begrudge those not playing by the rules. We vacilitate between the Prodigal son and the elder brother. The trick is to be an unaccusatory elder brother. Our recent popes, imho, have been vintage non-accusatory elder brothers. John XXIII, Paul VI and our current Pope all are lenient on the discipline side of things, which perhaps during my period of truancy helped bring me back. Something about flies, sugar & vinegar. So I would have a hard time criticizing the Pope.
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