I read (the current version of) Dear Abby in the paper everyday. Daily there is a letter complaining about some hurt or slight or pain that someone has experienced with the plaintive question: should I write the person who hurt me out of my life. Inevitably the answer is, maybe you should talk to the person first to find out what lay behind the interaction. Maybe the slight was completely unintended! What would St. Joseph have written into Dear Abby when he found his fiance was pregnant? Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. It took an angelic visitor in a dream to convince him that things weren’t as they seemed, that there was another explanation to what he was seeing. Since we don’t get many angelic visitors — in dreams or not — when we are dealing with something uncomfortable we should adopt the commandment of Jesus and “judge not” since we surely don’t know the whole story.
