Beam and Splinter (C8O)

My first thought while considering the gospel this week was to advise you to take its warning seriously when reading this blog: "Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?" The message isn't "don't read this blog," it's "this blog isn't the gospel, so exercise discretion and use discernment."

As I've grown older, and a little more open to criticism and other points of view, I've more and more come to understand the great wisdom in the "beam in your own eye" gospel adage. Of course, there is a certain irony in it that is inescapable: you always hear it from someone else, and so it's probably generated from inside that person's conscience, that is, the beam in the accuser's eye noticing the beam in yours. The point is that we all have beams. Some of them are light beams, and they actually help us see our own faults in the faults of others. Because of mimetic desire, we jump at the chance to distance ourselves from the wrongdoing we see, while neglecting to accept the truth that what we see in the other is a reflection of something within us.

Relationships with friends and family may provide an example. Let me make one up, this is completely fiction. But let's say your brother and his wife have an argument. I know your brother and his wife. They're both really good people, altruistic, hard-working, fun to be around. But your brother's wife thinks he's too critical of her: she tells him from time to time that he always finds fault

with what she says, is constantly correcting her, and she finds this wearisome and hurtful. Your brother, meanwhile, is thinking to himself, "Luke 6: 41-42," but doesn't dare say it because your sister-in-law will look it up and begin divorce proceedings.

The thing is, they're both right, probably, to some extent. But no matter how big the beam is, the story doesn't end there. Dig deeper and what do we find? All kinds of childhood hurts, lack of affirmation, denial of worth, the imitation of learned behaviors of criticism. We all do this: we try to make ourselves feel better by making someone else feel worse, and often by doing the same things we are accusing the other of doing. We can't help it. We were made to imitate others. When we act in self-defense we tend to use the weapons at hand.

I'm going to let go of this now because I'm not a psychologist and I'm not even that good an observer of human nature, I'm just trying to know myself better and I know that I do criticize in others what I don't like in myself. When I look back even at older posts in this blog at snarky and read the nasty things I've said about this priest or that politician, I'm shocked sometimes to realize that there are traits in me that are exactly what I was criticizing in my splinter-afflicted target.

Maybe those beams are all splinters? Maybe we're all the sum of all the treatment and mistreatment we've received in our lives, and some of us (I include myself in this group) have been unreflective about how that pain has influenced our interaction with the world, with the people we know and the decisions we make in our lives.

I'm guessing that to God, they're pretty much all splinters, and God is like a grandma who loves us so much, sees us with the finger-pointing and name-calling, and can't do much more than shake her head, get us a cold Pepsi and some fried chicken, and change the subject so we learn to see each other again as siblings instead of feral beasts or sworn enemies. And that's why Jesus wants to stop learning from each other, but to learn from and imitate him, because he imitates God who is "kind to the ungrateful and wicked." To learn from Jesus is this regard is its own reward, because as we heard in last Sunday's gospel, "...the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you." Not only will our lives be full of the divine love that gives rather than the mimetic divisiveness that seeks to destroy the other in order to build ourselves up: Jesus promises that "when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher."

As I said earlier about the Sermon on the Plain, after his Nazareth sermon about his vision of his ministry and vision of the arrival of the jubilee, Jesus gathered disciples, embarked on a campaign of miracles and exorcism (healing and liberation) and now takes the time to do some mystagogy with them on what all that means. They, and we, need new hearts to understand what we are seeing and hearing in Jesus. We have no other experience of someone who acts not to be admired or to divide and conquer enemies. We've lived by the rules of "how things have to be," of the normalcy of civilization for so long, that this surprising announcement of a new, peaceful kingdom is befuddling because we want it to become like all the kingdoms we've known: one that defeats enemies and makes us rich and powerful. It is not, and will never be like this, not in our world, not even in our homes. It is a place and time and method of invitation, collaboration, and self-gift. It is a reign of love by a Father-God or, if it works better for you overall (it does for me), a Grandma-God, who gathers rather than rules, who feeds rather than conquers, wait us out rather than gets angry.

I want to get inside of being my grandma. I'm the right age, anyway. I want to listen to the gospel, and finally act my age. I hope you don't have to wait this long!

Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this weekend:

Entrance Song: We Are Called (Haas)
Penitential Rite: (Kendzia/Daigle) "Lead Us to the Water"
Psalm 1: Roots in the Earth (Cooney) not the psalm of the day, but a wisdom psalm that summons us to delight in good and grow where the nutrients of the soul are most abundant
Celtic Alleluia (O'Carroll/Walker)
Preparation of Gifts: Were I the Perfect Child of God (John Bell) This charming text and accompanying Scottish melody seem wonderfully suited to today's liturgy, tacitly acknowledging both the faults have and the grace that helps us correct them. 
Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Lamb of God and Communion: May We Be One (Daigle/Cooney)
Recessional: Halle, Halle, Halle (Bell, arr. Haugen) To bury the Alleluia until Easter!