When someone is the object of backbiting or slander when they have suffered contempt from someone else or have felt hurt by another, by an institution or by a company, they tend to keep that wound inside them, and it burns them to the core. Sometimes this discomfort is felt so deeply that one even wishes that the person who committed the offence would disappear from existence.
There is then a spiral of passion that overrides the strictly rational. One confuses, for example, the other person’s mistake with the person himself. And in some cases, a supposed mistake, because the wrongdoer may also be the one who considers himself offended. But supposing that this is not the case, but that the error is that of the one who has offended. In this case, what would be sought is to make the error disappear; but not to wish the one who committed the error to disappear: he is a person. In the end, it is this reasoning that justifies the fact that the death penalty is less and less considered desirable. Towards the human person, it is appropriate to hope for his or her redemption.
But let us return to the question of rancour. It is an internal feeling that is constantly harassing and tends to grow out of proportion, compromising everything in its path. Therefore, resentment is a poison, which not only deteriorates a relationship but affects all the relationships one may have with others: the deterioration is in oneself. It is oneself that vitiates all other relationships: all of them, if they have not yet suffered a sufficient reason to give rise to a grudge, are to some degree close to it. It only requires that something is not understood in the action of the other, for this negative inner spring to jump out of proportion. Likewise, it is oneself that has lost the ability to control one’s passions are one’s reason, and therefore the dependence on the irrationality of the inner passions is very great.
Therefore, if one wishes to solve this inner problem, it is best to separate the error from the person of the alleged offender. Those who are fortunate enough to receive God’s help in fixing these inner issues, know that one is able to understand the errors of others, and to differentiate them from the person from whom they have come. A friend said to me, “I have often met the person who has slandered and defamed me the most, but that does not mean that I have not shown him affection and attention”.
Let us also bear in mind that all this process of internal deterioration does not produce any harm in the other: in the apparent or real offender. He will always be on the fringes of all this web of feelings and inner entanglements. In other words, he will never be hit by the lash of rancour. Therefore, what Shakespeare wrote about anger is true, and which Carmen Jiménez applies in a masterly way to rancour: “Rancour is a poison that you take yourself while waiting for the other person to die”.
