Of Beams and Splinters

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Guardian Angel, hypocrites, Jesus, Luke, spiritual blindness, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, the spiritual center

I was lucky this past week during the retreat I was leading at the Spiritual Center where I live that quick action and skill avoided a serious accident. Participants were out in pairs pruning trees and observing how mindfully they could be in working together. Suddenly, a large branch that had been wind-tossed during a storm came down and left a small piece of bark in the eye of one of the participants. It was quickly removed (to my great relief) by another “guardian angel” in the group and the pruning continued.

You can, perhaps, guess that today’s gospel was the famous text from Luke 6 where Jesus uses hyperbole to make his point. He asks, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?” He sounds frustrated, even calling that kind of offender a hypocrite. “You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your own eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye!”

Even a speck of dust in my eye can be painful. I notice any such invasion right away. I should take note of that when I begin to speak about the failings of others that seem so offensive, and practice reminding myself each time I am rubbing my eye to see clearly that focusing on the gifts of others would be a better way to avoid spiritual blindness of any kind.

Of Gnats and Camels

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camels, fidelity, fully human, gnats, hypocrites, injustice, Jesus, judgment, love, Matthew, mercy, Pharisees, Philippians, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, tithes

Sometimes in reading the gospels I am really convinced that Jesus was, as St. Paul tells us in the letter to the Philippians, fully human. On some occasions, Jesus gets really frustrated, as today in Matthew 23:23-26, when he takes the “Pharisees and hypocrites” to task for their behavior. No one could miss his point, but some of the images he uses to make those points are downright funny! I can just see him gathering steam as he goes into his condemnatory statement. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, he says. You pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin (really lightweight spices) and have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. But these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Sounds like a reasonable speech so far, but wait for it…Here comes the punch line in case they missed the point: Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!

Just picture trying to take that sentence literally. Imagine the exasperation that caused Jesus to resort to such an extreme. It was the injustice of the powerful toward the “lowly ones” that he saw, not unlike some of what is going on today in many quarters. Some days, when the weather is so muggy that bugs abound, I need to remind myself to keep my mouth closed when I’m outside so I don’t inadvertently swallow a bug. It’s more of a mentally unpleasant experience than a difficult physical one but always distasteful nevertheless. Multiply it maybe a thousand times or more to get the size of a camel and it’s easy to see the extent of injustice of which Jesus speaks. No one should be allowed that level of power over another, and Jesus knew it.

May we call out injustice wherever we see it in our society. May we also beware of swallowing camels in our dealings with each other and even try to avoid the gnats of everyday living as we choose to walk the path where the constant measure of things is love.