So this 11th-century Florentine John was a rich “bad boy.” He liked the power and pleasures money could buy, he enjoyed getting into scrapes and scraps, and he pushed people around–all the time ignoring the Church. His parents were quite proud of their man’s-man son. This is how that family rolled.

Some guy got into a fight with and ended up killing John’s brother, so John embarked on a blood vendetta–it seemed exciting to him and in keeping with his macho sensibilities. John finally found this guy, quite by accident, on what turned out to be Good Friday that year. The guy fell to his knees and and asked John to spare his life for the sake of Christ who was crucified. This was John’s epiphany moment. He spared the killer of his brother and then he went in search of a monastery to do some soul-searching and prayer. He threw himself down before a large crucifix in the chapel and began to call upon God. Butler writes of John:

Whilst he continued his prayer, the crucifix miraculously bowed its head to him, as it were to give him a token how acceptable the sacrifice of his resentment, and his sincere repentance were.

The first three times I read that sentence, I fixated on the Jesus-head of the crucifix (presumably a stone or a stone-and-wood structure in the monastery) bowing. Was John hallucinating? Was the construction of the crucifix a little shoddy and it ended up as a bobble-head Jesus? Did the depiction of Christ crucified actually bend momentarily and then restore its original position?

But here’s the thing that, on my fourth reading, I finally grasped: The miracle here is not Gumby Christ (as it were) but this phrase with respect to John: “the sacrifice of his resentment”!

Consider what would happen if this miracle were, say, to sweep America! Engage this imaginative exercise: What would America look like if everyone sacrificed his or her resentment–no matter how justifiable the resentment, no matter how grave the injustice, no matter how frustrating the “others” are or have been, no matter how unfair life has been….what if everyone decided “Here is where resentment stops!”? What if we sacrificed our resentment toward Trump, McConnell, Ryan, et al.? What if we sacrificed our resentment toward those who want to tell us how to live our lives and what we may or may not do? What if we sacrificed our resentment toward self-righteous liberals or toward gun-toting rednecks or toward our mothers and fathers? (John himself immediately had to face his own family’s utter lack of support for the changes in his approach to life and the world!) What if we sacrificed out resentment toward those who seem to have gotten lucky breaks that evaded us?

This would not strip us of our ability to be passionate, even angry on occasion. This would not deny us the capacity to speak up or to walk away. This would not shelter us from emotional highs and lows. But…I can’t help feeling that were we to sacrifice our resentment, it would change everything. We would be transformed by removing such a jagged weight from our own souls, and the tenor of all our relationships (even those with ourselves) would be dramatically liberated.

So–by whatever means we get there–be it a confirmatory bobble-headed crucifix or a ritual of fire, air, water, and earth; be it a slow, step-by-step release of each resentment that we can so identify or by a cold-turkey approach to dumping this excess weight that does nothing to actually help us in the face of injury or mistreatment–sacrificing our resentment may well be the biggest step many of us could take. I have to admit I’m even considering it myself!