Lord, that I may see

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Lord, that I may see

In today’s gospel (Luke 6: 39-42), Jesus simply offers His disciples teaching, and it is a teaching all about vision: moral vision by which we guide others and inner vision by which we know ourselves.

The former depends to a great extent on the latter. Who is the person who sees a splinter in the eye of another but has not noticed the plank in his own? It is every one of us! We do not automatically see ourselves truthfully; our wills, our appetites, and our attachments will not permit it. Solzhenitsyn said pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, but he could easily have called it self-love: the need to take satisfaction in our own self image, a need that is sometimes countered only by the opposite vice of self-hatred or abasement, as if we were not lovable at all. The truthful mind breathes the oxygen of reality in for all breath is somehow redolent of the Spirit of truth, the giver of life; the untruthful mind – the self-serving mind – breathes in the carbon monoxide of self-deceit and its senses slowly dim to uselessness. The truth of who we are and how we stand before God underpins our path back to Him, and as we come to know Him better, we know ourselves also better. Lack of self-knowledge is no virtue in His children.

Indeed, lack of that inner vision is potentially a catastrophe for others – for those we go out to and those we are responsible for. In Jesus’ parable, the blind cannot lead the blind. The lack of self-knowledge – the plank in one’s own eye – is a barrier to seeing the splinter in our brother’s eye. Those who learn from us are dependent on us to illuminate the path before them, for, as Jesus says, the pupil will be like his master.

Ultimately, charity begins at home, and mission begins with contemplation of God, for what truthful inner vision of ourselves can there really be if we do not see ourselves with God’s eyes or in His light? Through faith we know God, but its ambient light tells us who we are, as a species and as individuals. Knowledge without self-knowledge looks too much like a grab for power over what is around us, and perhaps even over others. If, as in Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, we too are

Here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

we must turn again towards to the source of all light and vision who illumines every person who comes into the world.