But community life can be a challenge… resentments creep into communities, grudges intensify, and relationships become cold. Living peacefully with others and maintaining healthy friendships requires a great deal of love, patience, and wisdom. That’s a challenge for everyone. All of us are called to live compassionately with one another and maintain healthy friendships with love, patience, and wisdom. None of us are angels.

In what he calls his Presupposition, Ignatius says that we “ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.”

Always give people the benefit of the doubt. What’s more, says Ignatius, if you’re not sure what a person means, you should, says Ignatius, “ask how the other means it.” The Presupposition helps us remember the other person’s intention, which helps ground relationships in openness. You approach every interaction with an open mind and heart by presuming—even when it’s hard to do so—that the other person is doing his or her best and isn’t out to get you. The Presupposition also helps to release you from grudges and resentments.

The Presupposition also helps you stay open to change, growth, and forgiveness. Peter Favre, one of the first Jesuits: “Remember, if we want to be of help to them, we must be careful to regard them with love, to love them in deed and in truth, and to banish from our souls anything that might lessen our love and esteem for them.” That is an astonishing comment in an era of bad feelings. Even simpler: “Take care, take care never to shut your heart against anyone.” Openness will not cure every relationship, but it can provide an opening for change, and it certainly won’t make things any worse. The Presupposition can make healthy relationships healthier and unhealthy relationships less unhealthy.

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