Motes And Beams

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" (Matthew 7:3). I think we usually consider the relative size of the mote and the beam as being representative of the relative size of our brother’s problems compared to our own, and I do believe that's a useful assumption. But perhaps a better one would be that the difference in size represents the difference in our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and our brothers. A mote is a speck of dust. You can't even see it unless the light hits it properly. Even our own brothers and sisters we know so little about. We don't know what they've been through. We don't know what goes on inside their heads, what scares them, what motivates them, what they struggle with. Even our closest friends and family members we only really know the tiniest mote about. This shouldn't be surprising because if we extend the metaphor to the beam, we don't even really know that much about ourselves. We have all kinds of cognitive biases, pathologies, neuroses, bad habits, good habits, medium habits, lingering traumas, unconscious dreams and desires. If we've got a beam sticking out of our eye, then it's going to be very difficult to focus on anything else besides the pain. All of us, no matter how well adjusted, have these great big beams in our eye, it could be grief or pride or hatred or whatever. Our face might rather look like a pin cushion with all of the beams sticking out of it. But as we take the time to deal with more and more of these beams we will be able to better understand ourselves and also be able to help our brothers and sisters when they come to us and say, look, you might think I've just got this little piece of dust in my eye, but it's actually the size of a baseball bat and I saw you were able to get that little piece of dust out of your eye (as they see it, to us it seemed like a telephone pole) so maybe you can help me with the beam in my eye. If we can acknowledge that we understand so very little about ourselves and why we do the things we do, we may be a little less hasty to assume we know exactly what someone else is going through and why they're making the mistakes they're making.