“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you know how you should respond to each one.” Colossians 4:6

“Thoughtlessness – I try not to think about it.”

Actually, it’s been on my mind a lot lately, and since I read this quote from young contemporary author Jarod Kintz, I’ve been thinking that he might have stumbled upon the mantra of the 21st century. Thoughtlessness, it seems, has become not only an acceptable state of affairs, but an expected one as well.

Just open up many a Facebook page, read any comment thread, or listen to the conversations of store clerks and managers the next time you’re shopping. It won’t be hard to hear them as they stand among a mass of customers, talking about people and problems as if they were behind closed doors – where they should be. While social media has the potential for accomplishing great things, it also has the potential to become a repository for careless words, perhaps not of the same magnitude as malice, but hurtful none-the-less. The human penchant for expression, unencumbered by limits or good sense, can damage a heart or a reputation, and, yet, it’s so easy to be drawn into the opportunity of letting the world know what we think when we are angry, hurt or just full of ourselves. I frequently hear from bewildered readers, friends or family members asking some variant of, “How could they have said that? Didn’t they stop and think about how much that might hurt me?”

The answer is usually, “They didn’t.” That’s the meaning of thoughtlessness – a careless indifference to consequences.

I have often wondered why we feel we should be able to say or write or do, whatever we want, regardless of who it may hurt. Perhaps we have embraced it as our right because we have been led to believe that the “I” is more important than the “thou” – a premise that would be challenged by all of the world’s religions that value reciprocity and the relationship of humanity to God. It is in our relationship with God, and God with us, that we discover our relationship with others.

In a society that glorifies the self, that feeds the ego with an unbalanced emphasis on the importance of personal satisfaction, achievement, and awareness, we are blessed still with the beauty of God’s wisdom, commanding us to “do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but [also] everyone for those of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).

The Book of Proverbs also teaches us to “forsake all thoughtlessness, and live; and walk in the way of understanding.”

We are challenged by our faith to be more than what our society and our culture tell us we should be. It is not an easy challenge to take up. But as Christians we are graced with something powerful that I think we often forget about – the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, Fortitude, Counsel, Piety, and Awe.

We may remember those gifts as a list we needed to memorize as we prepared for Confirmation, but in reality they are tools of God’s grace, of God’s life within us, making it possible for us to take up the challenge and live with the mind of Christ – who never spoke a thoughtless word.