IV.
Lesson I: Look at yourself and discover your own wretchedness.
Why waste your time with the affairs of others? Take care of your own instead. Who ever named you a reporter of the lives and deeds of others? Curious and absurd man, why do you set foot in other people's gardens? Find out what is going on in your own house instead, and say with La Fontaine:
Happy the man who stays at home,
Occupied with governing his own desires.
You may have heard about the porbeagle, or white shark. When safe inside its nest, it draws its eyes into a sac; when it leaves, they reappear on its forehead. It is blind at home and clear-eyed outside. As Socrates once stated concerning an aged man:
He knows everything from afar,
But he sees nothing nigh.
This occurs with many elderly people: show them an object close up, and they cannot see any details; draw it back and they see it better. Thus are many people shocked by the petty sins of others, whereas they are perfectly indulgent regarding their own serious faults. One might say:
The sovereign Maker
Created us all beggars in the same way,
Those of times past and those of today.
For our own faults He made the pocket in the back,
And the one in the front for others who slack.
So then, move the back pocket round in front And if you examine it well, no doubt you will find the defect you are complaining about. All of life's woes stem from the fact that each person flatters himself, and makes himself as much an enemy of others as a selfish friend of himself. We pluck out the straw from our neighbor's eye, and we do not see the beam in our own. Like the eye, which does not see the defects of the cheek because it is so close, we are perfectly blind regarding our own weaknesses. Very clever in discerning the slightest imperfections in others, we walk right by our own like blind people, although they are so close we could touch them. And the more sensitive we are when someone speaks ill of us, the bolder we are and the more pleasure we take in glutting ourselves on our neighbor's vices. We take delight in plunging our eyes and teeth into others' moral behavior. "They devise a wicked scheme, and conceal the scheme they have devised." (9) The back pocket is for our own defects, and the front pocket for the defects of others. We do not see the pocket that lies behind our back.
(9) Ps 63:6
Solomon speaks well of men of this caliber. "There is a group that is pure in its own eyes, yet is not purged of its filth," (10) he says. If an earthen pot were blackened with soot and looked in the mirror, it would not say to the smoked-up kettle, "Woe to you, you are all black!"
(10) Prov 30:12
Christian law speaks in the same manner. When Jesus Christ said, "Let those who believe they are without sin cast the first stone against this woman accused of adultery," (11) no one dared to be the first. Christians, let us do likewise. If we look at what is going on inside ourself and take care of our own business, we will find no one who better deserves to have stones cast at him than ourself. But the crafty devil catches us one way or the other: either we commit sin ourself, or we accuse those who do. Saint John of the Ladder explains it thus: "The devil tempts us to commit sin; and when he does not succeed, he points scornfully at those who have fallen." We do not understand our task very well when we neglect our own nettle-choked garden and go to pull up weeds in someone else's flower bed. Look my friend, stay in your own garden! There are enough burdocks, tares and nettles to weed out right there. Take a hard look at yourself and you will no longer see defects in others. Saint Bernard says, "If you examine yourself well, you will never backbite others." (12)
(11) Jn 8:7
(12) Saint Bernard, De inter. Dom, Chapter 42