Little Words of Wisdom

"Never repeat a conversation, and you will lose nothing at all."--Sirach 19:7

I'm sure I'm not alone in being thankful that we are reading passages from Sirach during the Morning Daily Office to mitigate for the woes of Revelation. I tend to read Revelation not as literal but as this character John's really bad acid trip. That tends to help mitigate as well!

The wise words provided in Sirach this morning deal with gossip. We've all engaged in that at one time or another sometimes in a manner that is offering up titillating details about another person's life, or giving a friend some background on a situation they might be about to tackle. Sometimes, we think that gossip isn't that harmful.... unless you are the person about whom others are speaking.

In my previous employment as a radio reporter, I would say that about 90-percent of what I would hear every day boiled down to gossip and rumors which I was then supposed to question and test to see if they were true or false. That was fine as long as I was good to make the inquiry and make sure that what I was hearing had some basis in reality. But I was also working in an environment where gossip ran amok throughout the building and, too many times, to very hurtful conclusions. It was like having Iago as your manager with a bunch of Othellos running around smothering each other based upon half-truths or out and out lies.

Thank God I'm out of that place!

Gossip, and the repeating of conversations that are best left alone, is quite often one of the forms of bullying that happens in schools. It's one of the reasons that LGBT kids keep their true selves hidden. There's a tremendous risk in coming out that then you will be the subject of everyone else's "talk". I certainly figured that out in prep school, which was a place full of gossips. To tell anyone what was going on inside me was too huge an ordeal. And so I learned to create many layers of "self" to keep my true self protected. It worked for the most part. But then would have to be "undone" or "unlearned" as a survival pattern as an adult.

My challenge today is to weigh carefully what information to share with others and what can be allowed to die with me. I think that's the challenge we all face.