"If your brother sins against you,
go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.
If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” (Mt 18:15)
From the eleventh-century Cistercian writer Isaac of Stella:
“Why is it that we take so little care to seek opportunities to help each other, to see how we could be useful to each other, even where we really know that it is necessary, where we see that we could bear the burdens of our brethren? The Apostle urges us to do this when he says, “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.” And again, “Bear with one another in charity.” This is the only law of Christ.
The how is it that when I see in my brother something that cannot be put right, because of either his physical or his moral weakness, I do not bear patiently with him, loving him and caring for him with all my heart? Is it not that I lack in myself the charity that bears all things, suffers all things and is kind, because it is love? Whatever manner of life a man follows, it is not that, but sincere love for God and others which really is pleasing to God. Love – that is the whole way and the end toward which we are going. In very truth, there is no failure whatever that can take us out of love when it is genuine. May he grant us that love, for without it we can in no way please him who lives and reigns, God forever and ever.”
Speaking to someone with delicacy about something they have done that may have hurt us is certainly a courageous and charitable way to forward our relationships. But, living with people over the long haul, it does become clear that some relationships do not sustain too much face-to-face honesty, and some faults are not subject to fixing this side of the grave. St Benedict defined good zeal as the ability to: “most patiently endure one another's infirmities, whether of body or of character” (RB 72). And it is the infirmities of character which can be the hardest to accept. No doubt a healthy sense of my own infirmities of character will help me in this. Patient endurance is surely better than treating anyone like an outsider, but better than endurance is love.