Sitting with the Sacred

Sirach 27:4–7
Psalm 92:2–3, 13–14, 15–16
1 Corinthians 15:54–58
Luke 6:39–45

“Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye” (Luke 6:42). This sentence makes the process of seeing clearly or helping someone else see clearly sound so simple and linear. All I have to do is hoist a “beam” out of my eye, and then I will see clearly and be able to help others see clearly. It sounds like a single step, a one-time action – at least when I look at the sentence as a whole.

My perspective shifts when I focus on the translation “beam” (Luke 6:42). A beam sounds like something that would trap my whole body under it, not just block my vision. The negative behaviors and thought patterns I get caught in definitely feel like burdens that imprison my mind and weigh down my body more than something I could rub out of my eye would.

A beam is something I need someone’s help to free myself from. Yet everyone else is being stabbed in the eye by splinters or trapped by beams as well. Even when a person doesn’t struggle with a particular thought pattern or behavior, everyone gets wounded. Everyone faces uncertainty. Only God who knows all and has the power to break me out of confinement and to lift what weighs me down. Because I live in a world where the beauty of creation is visible alongside the suffering that pride, fear, and the human condition carry with them, this process of freeing and unburdening is one that will last a lifetime — and beyond. Again and again, I’ll have to entrust my burdens and limitations to God, asking God to lift them, and if not to lift them, to help me bear their weight.

Knowing this doesn’t let me feel like I’m losing spiritual weight or like I have more room to breathe and the Spirit. In fact, I feel more like I’m sitting in a room with the door open only a crack. The window blinds are closed. It’s daylight, so the room isn’t black, but it’s gray. Light barely slips in around the door and between the slats of the blinds. The door is too heavy for me to pass through on my own, so on my own, I can’t lead someone else out of the same room, and certainly not out of a room different than the one I’m in. This “dim room” metaphor is a visualization of what Luke 6:42 says to me this week.

I have no way to know how the amount of light in my rooms will change throughout my life. I know that neither will they reach full brightness, nor will the doors be fully open while I journey on this earth. My prayer as I write this is that I’ll relate to others with an awareness that I’m as unable to see clearly as they are. There are more obstacles blocking my path to the sources of natural light than I realize, so others can see things I can’t, even as we’re all looking for light and making our way through dim rooms. Therefore, I suspect that If I want to help others, the first step forward is to acknowledge the limitations on my vision of and movement through life’s rooms. The second step might be to acknowledge any ways I benefit from walking with them.

As we journey together, I hope my fellow travelers will find more to trust in my accompaniment than I recognize. After all, I’m “corruptible” but “clothe[d]” with the “incorruptibility” of God. I’m “mortal” but “clothe[d] in immortality (1 Cor.15:53). It’s hard to see that clothing through the “beam[s] in my eye[s] (Luke 6 42). The result is that I don’t see myself or others as clearly as God does. The good news is that I’m wrapped in God anyway. What I need to do is remember I’m wrapped in God’s reflective clothing and not shrug off those clothes. They will keep me from getting lost and going in circles in low light. They’re why “It is good to give thanks to the Lord” (Psalm 92:2).

Work cited

The Bible. The New American Bible Revised Edition, Kindle edition, Fairbrother, 2011.