Saint Luke 6:36
"How can you say to one another, friend, let me remove the speck in your eye, whilst at the same time you dont see the beam in your own eye?"
"Hypocrite, remove first the beam from your own eye, then your sight will be sharp enough to remove the little obstacle in the others eye.
A bling spot in the eye, according to the dictotionary, is the place where the optic
nerve enters the eye, sensitive to the stimulation of the light. Hence the term is
used in the figurative sense: something one does not see, recognize or understand,
despite the fact that one is repeatedly stressed.
It appears that every human has a blind spot somewhere. The Gospel mentions " a beam in the eye ".
We are not always aware of it, so not everyone has to be called a hypocrite.We see each other's blind spots, they show off our behaviour, which creates confusion and misunderstanding.
No one has ever seen his own back. Well you can try it with 2 mirrors in the hairdressers, but see in the mirror.
Did you know that the Japanese have a very nice bath ritual? People, who are friends merge together into a bath for a wash. An important favour is to watch each other's back.So if it was me and a friend, he could look at all the spots on my back of which I do not know anything about. My friend sees the burdens and the frustrations that I have to bear and he washes everything away. I do the same
for me. It is a rite of mutual forgiveness, similar to what we call the Confession.
If a blind plays guide for another blind and plods along , Jesus identifies them as people with the same spot. Tell me, how often do you hear someone say, " I am not a racist, but.......".Others respond with :"yes, you are right, I do feel the same way. People identify with each other's blind spots.
Blind spots, prejudices and judging in advance, before we even have taken the opportunity to inform ourselves of the facts of an informed judgement.
There are Anglican Catholic and ecclesistical blind spots and prejudices.
Some Church documents can only be understood as an expression of typical bureaucratic predujice In order to find out whether someone is a Catholic Traditionalist or just a Critic of the Church, you track their response to the same message in the Media. You get the impression that both of them have read or seen something else. They read or see only what their predujice confirms.
Is it possible that our blind spots can be healed through the Holy Gospel and our Catholic Faith?
The Holy Gospel has healing power, if we read it without bias, which means, to take off your dark glasses and or polish them , those glasses through which we look at the well-known texts. Otherwise, when we read the first fragment of a parable, we dont concentrate any longer, we know the follow up, well we think that we do. We really dont get the real meaning, the call to repentence, the encouragement to think differently and to live our lives differently.
The light of our Catholic Faith can make us " clairvoyant". Then we spot things, which we have always overlooked.
But fellow Catholic Christians could help us. In the tradition of the Church or the Chloister we know the practice of giving someone a " brotherly" repremand: i..e to point out to your brother or sister some behaviour or wrong judgement of which he or she is not aware. And offcourse you place yourself under the critical judgement of your brother or sisters in the Catholic faith.
But in order to put this brotherly repremand into practice it is necessary to be cured from individualism, which is so common nowadays.
We would really make some progress if we purify our knowledge of words ( and our behaviour) from the slogan " Everyone for him or herself and God for us all".
Amen.
Father Ed Bakker
Anglican Catholic Church/Original Province
Mission of Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne
Bendigo
Victoria
Australia
