Complaint Department

Seeing our own faults as we complain about others

06/20/2022

Mt 7:1-5 Jesus said to his disciples: “Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”

The higher up you go in any organization, the more you become the complaint department. When someone has a problem in the school, for example, they want to complain not just to the principal but to the pastor. If someone has a complaint in the parish, they want to go over the pastor’s head to the bishop. If someone doesn’t like something the bishop says or does, they write a letter to the pope. And if they don’t like something the pope does, they write to his mother and complain to her. We all know a man’s boss is his mother, just ask her.

It is always easier to go over someone’s head and complain about them rather than have an uncomfortable and awkward conversation with the individual with whom we have a beef or an ax to grind. I wonder how many hours a day our poor bishop must spend responding to emails and letters of Catholics complaining about us problematic priests. CEOs get the corner office so they have a nice view while dealing with all the sour grapes people throw at them.

But sooner or later everyone gets to be the complaint department, and listen to other people’s aches and pains, problems and issues. Here are three things I’ve learned that you might try when you are the complaint department for your family and friends. First, a friend of mine said that whenever her sister calls her, and it’s obvious she is upset, she asks: “Okay, do you want to vent, or do you want to find a solution?”

Sometimes people complain because they just want someone in authority to listen to them. We find some satisfaction in getting things off our chest, and that talking itself is the solution. So, the first tool of being the complaint department is to listen with empathy. What does that mean? It means not only hearing the facts, but also paying attention to feelings: their fears, their sadness, their anger, their frustration. When you hear someone complaint, the first thing to ask is: does this person want to vent or to find a solution?

The second suggestion is to invite people who complain to pray for the person they are complaining about. That may seem like a pious platitude – “Oh, just pray about it!” – but prayer changes things, and it changes us. Whenever I get sideways with a staff member or feel family frustrations, I stop and say one Hail Mary for that person. Immediately my temperature starts to cool down.

Of course, we are praying that God will bless them and change them and help them with whatever we think their problem is. But notice what is happening to us: we are not complaining, we are praying. Maybe that’s why God sends troublesome people to us: to teach us to pray. And what does prayer produce? It causes us to see differently, we begin to see the world through God’s eyes and see other people like he sees them.

And how does God see them? Like his little children “who do not know their right hand from their left” (Jon 4:11). Just like parents are very forgiving of their own children’s mistakes – they will forgive them a million times – so too is God with our errors. When we pray, therefore, we start to see others like that, and that is a second useful tool of the complaint department.

And the third thing is what Jesus says in the gospel today in talking about wooden beams and planks. And this is the hard part. Whenever someone gets up our dander and we feel they are totally wrong and have to be stopped because they are going to ruin the world, realize there is a much bigger weakness in us that threatens to ruin the world.

Naturally, we must at times recognize sinful behavior and call a spade a spade. Jesus says as much in Mt 18, his Ecclesiastical Discourse on fraternal correction. Still, all correction should be carried out with a profound awareness that there is something as bad, or worse, in me that I am missing (my plank), as I try to point out your problems. The third tool of the complaint department is to include yourself in the long list of woes and worries of the world.

So, next time you get a promotion as a principal, or pastor, or pope, realize you are also now the complaint department. That is why you get the corner office and get paid the big bucks.

Praised be Jesus Christ!