Paul's phrase, "widen your hearts," is so loose, so non-technical, so undefined, so ... wide open, as to invite—or coerce—some outlay of cogitation on my part. What it means to "widen your heart" I am evidently free to explore without restriction, since I am so unlikely to go too far with it that, as with other virtues Paul names elsewhere, "against such things there is no law" (Galatians 5:23).
I discover there are two ways of seeing my brother. There is the "merely human" way (1 Corinthians 3; 4)—a severe, loveless accuracy. A clinical fixation on the wart on his nose. A covering the sun with one finger, as a Mexican boy once told me.
Then there is the "wide" way. It sees possibility; it is full of self-knowledge; it "believes all things, hopes all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7); it regards the other as "a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17) and abandons the tired modes of "measuring" and "comparing" (2 Corinthians 10:12). It is the difference between mercy and justice, kindness and shrewdness, remembering one's own reflection in the mirror and forgetting.
Andree Seu
