The Tactfulness of Love

November 3

The Tactfulness of Love - Page 1
by George H. Morrison

And this I pray, that your love may abound…in all judgment— Phi_1:9

Tact—the Grace of Touching Others Gently

The word that is here used for judgment is a very interesting word. It occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. Its primary signification was perception by any of the senses, but gradually it got specialized into perception by the sense of touch. And so, rising into higher spheres (for words have their own moral history), it came to mean what we describe as tact. Tact is the same word as touch. Tact is the kind of way in which we touch things, but not in a material sense like wood or stone. It is the unseen substance of which life is made with its sensibilities and shrinking, its strange and instantaneous reactions. Such contacts we are forced to make in every period of life. Our years are spent in ceaseless interaction with the lives of other people. And whenever we learn to touch these other lives delicately and understandingly, then we possess the charming grace of tact.

Tact Grows with the Deepening of Love

Now it is notable that Paul connects this grace with the growth and deepening of love. When love abounds, it inevitably blossoms into all kinds of delicate perception. These Philippians to whom he wrote seem, happily, to have been ignorant of heresy. But they were very ready to misunderstand each other; there was a good deal of social bitterness in Philippi. The grace they lacked, sometimes without ever meaning it, was that interior delicacy which would not hurt or irritate another. There are many people who mean well yet are always rubbing others the wrong way. Often they are quite unconscious of it and never dream of the hurt that they are causing. And one can gather from this letter that in Philippi, for all its orthodoxy, there was a good deal of that social unpleasantness. Paul was perfectly aware of that. He had his hand on the pulse of all his churches. He saw how it spoiled the joy and peace and harmony that ought to reign and rule among the saints. And the notable thing is he does not waste his time in exhorting his children to a greater tactfulness—he prays that they may have a greater love. He goes right down to the heart of things. He fixes his attention on the center. Let love have a controlling place, and the touch will become infinitely delicate. What to avoid, what not to say or do, that is not a secret of the intellect; it is always a secret of the heart.

You Are Tactful with What You Love

This tactfulness of love is apparent in many different spheres. Watch a botanist handling a flower—you can tell that he loves it by the way he touches it. Look at a mother with her little baby—her very touch reveals the mother-heart. I can often tell if a young fellow loves books, not by the clever way in which he speaks of them, but by the way in which he handles them. Let a rough, coarse man once love a woman, and it is amazing how tactful he becomes. He begins to divine, by the genius of the heart, the delicate attentions she is longing for. For there are little acts of courtesy and grace that mean far more than any gold or silver to such as may be sensitively inclined. It is always a sure mark that love is dying when tact takes to itself wings and flies away. When the delicate perceptions disappear, it is a token that the heart is hardening. And that is the tragedy of many lives, not the blighting touch of infidelity, but the roughened touch (so rough that it may hurt) which betrays the decadence of love.

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