When I was eight years old I remember walking up to our second floor apartment starting to cry. My mother at the door looked at my wet eyes and asked, “What’s the matter?” I told her I had seen another boy walking with his big sister and he was constantly falling to the sidewalk. No one, not even his sister, would help him. My mother just looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you?”
My tears stopped and I was stupefied. I had expected my mother to be sympathetic with my tearful sentiments. Instead her remark pointed out that I had the power to help someone and I had failed even to see it.
Was it her intention to hurt my self-esteem? She did not follow up her comment with any lecture or discussion. She had no desire to ridicule. I received a short to-the-point medicinal shot that lanced misused sentiment and made me realize that I was empowered to help someone and not just feel sorry for them. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of why we hesitate to give or receive correction. We will see our unpleasant reflection in a mirror – our pride challenged and our weakness exposed. How much more comfortable are the confines of a false man-made image of ourselves, of others and of the world.
We don’t like medicinal shots. What a harsh world if we were to expect everyone every time to be a doctor administering some medical procedure. Ah, but I’m willing to take my medicine and become a better person! But do we really want our eyes opened? I wish I could say that my mother’s “Why didn’t you?” was a life changing moment. With no exaggerated self-deprecation I estimate that ninety-nine percent of the time after the incident of the falling boy I was still blind to the way I could help others. Thomas Merton once wrote that we do not seek the truth but the half-truth that justifies us. It is painful to face ourselves and even more daunting to take up the task of healing or strengthening.
2.
We don’t want to make the difficult journey all the way to truth. We tire easily and want to settle for a substitute, an idol, a Golden Calf. We are reassured and made comfortable when joined by so many other worshippers of the Calf. I enjoy the security of being with the crowd. They confirm my subjective opinions and my self-image. The crowd protects me.
Not only am I reassured and protected by my fellow Calf-worshippers but I seem to make physical and emotional profit from them. With others at my side I can laugh and mock the falling boy, immune to dangerous sentiment and sharing the intoxicating drink of our normalcy.
At this point we not only dislike facing the truth but we begin to fear being cast out of what we see as normal human society. Perhaps not only to be cast out but attacked. And with long exposure to this intoxicant comes addiction. We don’t just get drunk once and regret it. We need the intoxication all the time whether alone or with companions.
Addicts are hostile to attempts to moderate their habit. Most of us seem to react with instant anger to any evaluation pointing to any mistake or problem. Even after we are told we are good and right in every way but one, we usually ignore all the positive compliments and focus solely on the single negative. We see it not as a healthy opportunity but as an undeserved piercing insult.
Falsity can be inebriating at first but it always ends in some kind of harm. Yet so can overdosing on “honesty”. The power of being critical, realistic, honest gives me a high. I stand upon a mountain looking down. Uttering lies about another person is so obviously tawdry – far beneath me! I’m going to inform you! “Did you know he used to…?” The taste of “telling the truth” about someone in order to subtract from that person’s attraction by detraction is sweet. It is our most frequent and entirely overlooked misuse of “being honest”.
3.
Originally I only wanted to think and write about the puzzle of why we don’t speak the truth to each other. Sure, I realized immediately that what is objective reality and what we think is true are not necessarily the same. Yet the personal moral question that perplexed me remained – why do we withhold our full understanding, knowledge and insights from other people? But my notes and reflections were abruptly silenced just as my childhood thoughts on that second floor landing. I realized how “honesty” was most often arrogance and it had frequently distorted my perception of the real situation. Forty-six years after “Why didn’t you?”, I was still focused more on other’s behavior and not my own. I was staggered again. I had forgotten my role. I assumed and hid in a misshapened version of my mother’s: Why didn’t he? Why didn’t she? Why don’t they?
When you worry about how the rest of the world responds, it distracts you from your own response.
4.
Jesus said not to try to take the speck out of your brother’s eye until you take the plank out of your own. People forget that he did go on and say that once the plank is removed then you can see to take out the speck.
How do I remove the plank, take out the speck?
Who would deny that conducting any surgery, especially eye surgery, on someone else is easier than on one’s self? I’m going to have to ask somebody to help remove that plank from my eye. I don’t want to overbuild on the hyperbole of Jesus but going to try anyway.
- Knowing I have a log jutting out leaves me cautious in approaching my brother’s speck. I don’t want to poke his eye out or smack him in the head with my plank.
- Knowing I have a plank and getting help pulling it out might teach me some skills necessary to operate on Brother or Sister.
Again, only somebody else can really assist us in getting out something stuck in the eye of our moral vision. While the company of the Calf deludes us, it is only through others that we come to know the truth. My mother showed me the difference between a helping hand and ineffectual sentimentality. I need the example and instruction of others. Who has enlightened you?
The cliché is that we cannot see the back of our head. In fact, we cannot fully see our physical or mental state without the mirrors provided by other people. We cannot even become self-aware without the presence and language given to us by others. Self-awareness is not the result of mere complication. Some imagine that the increasing evolutionary size and ability of physical brains (applied now also to artificial brains) leads, like critical mass, to human consciousness.
We simply wake up as from a dreamless sleep and are self-conscious? No one need speak to the first self-aware creature, “Awake”? This is the same logical fallacy as the self-creating universe. Someone who has never achieved any particular level of awareness ultimately needs the agency of another’s look, word, picture, sign or sound to enlighten them.
5.
The difference between those intoxicated with the drugs of falsehood or arrogance and those whose eyes are full of specks and planks is that the first group have damaged judgment that requires them to reach a point that sobers them while the second group have basicly sound judgment once the impediment is removed. This second group are not usually Calf-worshippers but a fraternity capable of mutual correction. There is no fraternal correction of the Calf people, only casting pearls before drunken, stumbling swine. Members of the cult of self can be compared to domesticated animals because they live caged between birth and death. They see only what this temporal span can hold and that leads humans to every kind of physical, mental and spiritual violence.
When a person recognizes and accepts the difficulties of journeying to the promised land of the truth, they become free. This is not the faux substitute of mere “independence” – freedom from Egypt, freedom from Rome, the British, slavery, etc.. This is the free man or woman who leaves the limited world of self and is alive in the real world of Creation.
Perhaps a surgeon could kidnap someone off the street and, restraining them, perform successful surgery. But moral correction needs cooperation. I have been both a stumbling pig and a resigned patient. Looking at me, or anyone, it may be very difficult to tell which at what time. So, since most of us most of the time are morally uncooperative, many instances of attempted fraternal correction have left us with a bad taste in our mouth. This negative pavlovian training makes us excessively shy about offering correction to others.
How can I tell if I’m helping a brother or sister with a speck? Or arrogantly showing my power to step on another person by harsh judgments? Or throwing a pearl to a pig? One possible clue is that arrogant Calf-worshippers want to attack those who differ. Speaking for myself, I have rarely approached others with the gentle, skilled hand of fraternal charity. Finger-pointing, fault-finding are the hallmarks of being judgmental. Using our abilities to help others when they come to us or are legitimately placed in our care is love.
There is a lot of unnecessary and /or poor surgery in the world.
“Facts” should not be used as weapons. We use insight and knowledge according to the patient’s need. Kindness and courtesy are medicinal.
Do we need to say anything at all? Do we need to be “blunt”? Jesus spoke first of “sleep” when he meant death. Sometimes people really have no need to know some fact. Why disturb them when they might not understand this “fact” or be able to do anything about it? I certainly have to stop myself from pasing on “facts” that only serve to scandalize or slander. Sometimes people have no right or need to know what I know. I don’t tell them a falsehood. Yet, must I volunteer extra knowledge to correct their ignorance or misunderstanding? Cardinal Newman’s debate with Charles Kingsley in 19th century England on equivocation expands our sense of the care we should take in dispensing the medicine of truth. Need we voluntarily surrender every fact to others even when it could hurt us, them or someone else?
Being truthful does not require emotional public nudity. Simply to strip ourselves in public of all personal private thoughts and secrets is destructive. There is a difference between not speaking up out of fear and not revealing all out of concern for the ability of another to understand or benefit. The analytical realist often is not being realistic. Analyzing something or, worse, someone is frequently the dissection after death. The living whole needs to be communicated and received in order to be understood. Everyone will nod when this is said but most of us will return to the superficial look which ignores the subject or the analytical stare which eliminates the subject.
6.
You may have noticed that the incident of the falling boy was more about orthopraxy (doing what is true) than orthodoxy (knowing what is true). There was no dispute that the boy should be helped – I just didn’t realize I should be the one giving the aid. But what help to others could the falling boy offer? A silly question – after he recovers then he can find his own ways to assist others. And what if he never recovers and is always falling? Or he thinks he is always in danger of falling?
Many of us suffer from what I call the drowning man syndrome. A man gulping his lungs full of water cannot consider the needs of people standing on the shore. We are so desperate to get the necessities of life that we feel we can’t look to the needs of others. This attitude can continue in our souls even after we are comfortably aboard the life raft. I’m still drowning, I’m still struggling to support myself or my family, what can I really do for others?
What are a few loaves and fish among so many?
7.
I won’t speak the truth because of self-serving doubt – “How can I be right and know the truth?” So I will keep silent and feel very humble – as the truth is ignored or attacked. I will suppress urges to speak the truth because of hopelessness. Again I address the dumb idol in my heart – “Why should I? It will make no difference.”
The task is arduous and we refuse the effort. Or we take the “lazyman’s load” and want to rush the work of explaining our understanding.
Our pride convinces us to be always right. We want to win the debate, win the election, win the job, not speak the truth.
Sometimes, like very young children we innocently speak the truth as we understand it in our hearts. Why did Jesus say that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of God?
Sometimes, like martyrs trusting in God, we stand and witness.
