The Speck in Thy Brother’s Eye

“And why dost thou look at the bit of straw in thy brother’s eye but considerest not the beam in thine own eye?” Matthew 7:3 (Kempton Translation)

Things are not always as they seem. The Writings talk about not spiritually judging people — not assuming they are going to heaven or hell based on what we think we see in them. We certainly have to be able to make distinctions and judgments about what is right and wrong, otherwise everything would fall apart, but we can’t know someone’s internal state. We should be working on cleaning up our own lives first anyway, and when we are doing that, the Lord can help us see much more clearly.

I’ve been lucky to live my whole life in New Church communities surrounded by friends, family and teachers who have supported me in examining the Doctrines of the New Church.

Three years ago I graduated from Bryn Athyn College of the New Church and then immediately moved to Virginia to start working at Colonial Williamsburg — apparently the largest living history museum in the world (yes, it is a very fun magical job). This was my first time living far from a New Church community and the first time for me to really have to apply all the things I’ve been learning my whole life. There have been so many new things for me to learn, lots of them fun and satisfying — and several of them not quite so fun. One of these challenges was something I was even expecting but still didn’t enjoy it at all — a moral culture shock. Settling into life here outside of work I found that my moral standards seemed way higher than most people, which made it hard at first to see the good in my neighbor, and which also blinded me to some glaring problems in myself.

The most immediately apparent and upsetting culture shock was the state of marriage in the world.

We certainly have a treasure trove of truths about marriage in the Church. I’ve grown up thinking and talking about it a LOT. I love thinking about how Conjugial Love is a holy love because it is from the Lord alone, and how marriage and religion go hand in hand. I love all the teachings about the unique and complementary natures of men and women. I love the quote about how the states of this love are innocence, peace, tranquility, inmost friendship, full confidence and a mutual desire of mind and heart to do the other every good and that all joys are gathered into it.

It was quite a shock to get thrown into contact with my generation outside the church where no one seems to understand marriage at all and where it is frequently mocked. The vast majority of people seemed to see no difference at all between living with someone before and after marriage, and no problem with living with many different people before marriage. Instead of an appreciation for the differences between men and women I found a lot of antagonism towards the idea of there being differences at all. Most frustrating to me was all the disgusting jokes I encountered, all the foul language and the extremely frequent talk about people’s bodies in a objectifying manner. What made me really surprised and grossed out was that often the women seemed to encourage this sort of talk about themselves! They were joking along with the guys or introducing the objectifying conversations. Married people were saying the same things.

At first I wasn’t sure what to do with this situation. I tried to find things I did agree on with people and connected with them only in those areas. I did find a few people I could truly be friends with on a lot of levels, but they were relatively few. In my mind I began putting people into two categories: my side and the other side. I started feeling pretty discouraged about morality and the hope for real marriage in the world. I even started assuming that people didn’t have morals even before I got to know them.

Initially what I thought I was supposed to be learning from the experience was that the New Church has beautiful truths and the world is pretty messed up without them. While this may be the case there is something much bigger I needed to learn for myself.

It is easy to identify with truth as if it is my truth simply because I believe it intellectually, but this is a form of spiritual theft. It is stealing from the Lord because I am taking credit for the ideas and not acknowledge that it is the Lord who is the source of all good and truth. He gives us these truths so generously and we should never take credit for them. Another way this attitude steals from the Lord is when I only use the truth intellectually, using it to look at how badly everyone is doing, rather than using the Lord’s truth to change my life.

Here I was staring at the speck in my brother’s eye and completely ignoring the fact that I had a very large beam in my own. I should have been looking at ways in which I might not have been supporting marriage in my life. Every time I let myself feel hopeless about it and especially when I assume the worst of people then I am not believing that the Lord can help any of us out of our evils and on to higher states. The Lord promises that Conjugial Love will be restored as it was in earlier ages. Who am I to be hopeless about it?

My critical attitude toward other people made me blind to the good things the Lord was doing around me the whole time. I have found that there are a lot of people I initially dismissed based on the horrible things they said about marriage, but more recently I’ve noticed ways in which they care about strengthening the friendship in their marriage, or ways in which single people still hope for a lovely marriage like their grandparents had. I wasn’t really seeing and appreciating the fact that there have been many new weddings down here over the last few years — the Lord is leading people toward that goal even if they don’t know every single truth about marriage (well guess what, neither do I!). Probably the most humbling thing I noticed recently though is the type of person who is doing far better than I am at following what they think is right no matter how little they know. In the middle of this modern culture that says there is absolutely no difference between marriage and living together beforehand, three different couples I know chose to not live together before their weddings. How rare is that!

I am so grateful for this change in perspective. I am no better than anyone else, in fact in one sense I am far worse because I can see the evil in my life in a way that I can’t see it in other people. We are all human beings who are inclined to evils of every kind. It is our responsibility to work on the evils in our individual lives and by doing that, the Lord can help us find ways to support and be supported by each other. I feel more grateful than ever to know about the doctrines of the New Church. I also know better than ever to watch out for not hoarding these truths and taking credit for them. The quality and quantity of what we know makes absolutely no difference so long as we neglect to use it in the right way. The people I know outside the Church have a lot of valuable things to teach me about actually applying what I say I believe.

About Dara King

Dara King comes from a large family that she loves painfully much. She grew up in a fairytale New Church school in Kempton Pennsylvania where she had some incredibly dedicated and inspiring teachers. Later, at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church she studied History (and also got to take lots of courses in Religion, Sacred Languages, English, and Theater). She still feels very inspired by her teachers from BA. Now she is a Costumed Interpreter and 18th Century Dancer at the Colonial Williamsburg Museum in Virginia. This means that she gets to play dress-ups for a job and work with some of the most interesting people in one of the largest living history museums in the world. She feels lucky to get to learn how to be a more useful, orderly New Churchwoman while doing a use that is visibly helpful and enjoyable to the guests she meets (and it is also enjoyable to herself!). She also loves when people come to visit Williamsburg so start planning a vacation and feel free to contact her if you want suggestions!

13 thoughts on “The Speck in Thy Brother’s Eye

  1. Oh what precious and useful insights, Dara! Thank you oh so much for these reminders to focus on our own beams…both sobering and uplifting. Faith in the Lord to bring good out of what often feels like a broken world is a great way to start my day. Thank you!

  2. Dara, this perked me up and made my heart happy. Your perspective is fresh and your writing style lucid. Thank you for honest sharing around a topic to which you have given careful thought–those two things together are somewhat rare! I am happy to hear of what you say you are seeing and learning. I too have felt humbled by my contact with good people out there in the world, who are working with different tools than mine. Your work and your life sound envigorating.

    1. Thank you very much, Mrs. Buss. Very kind of you. I’m really grateful for the fact that we can become more humble over time.

  3. Thank you so much for sharing, Dara. I really needed to hear this! I have also found myself falling into a “me vs. them” sort of attitude on my trip here in Ireland. Just like you said, I tried to focus on the things that my new acquaintances and I did agree on – and that was good at first because it made me feel more connected to them. But the evil spirits do want us to think we can rule over others, and it was surprising to me just how quickly I turned around and spent energy focusing on all the things they said or did that were “wrong.” I am grateful for the reminder that it is not my truth! And humbled to think just how easy it is to abuse it.

    1. Love you Leanna! Thanks for the nice comment. I love hearing about your life right now.

  4. I really enjoyed this, Dara. And it got me thinking again…I had kind of the opposite experience growing up. I did not grow up in a insular church community and all my friends were mostly Mormons. Fortunately my friends came from moral families but I was still constantly exposed to the immorality and secularism of the world. The New Christianity became this little beacon of healing and Truth in my mind. I could excuse the immorality of the people I met in the world because “they don’t know better– they don’t have access to the Truths and consequently real Goods that I have.” I suppose that was the seed of my interest in sharing the NC.

    Then I went to Bryn Athyn College of the New Church and discovered many many “New Church” people who were less moral than my Mormon friends had been! I was appalled, and didn’t know how to process that. In my mind these people had no excuse– they had exposure to the Word and HD. It has been a painful process for me to learn that knowing our religion is not the same as KNOWING it– if that makes sense.

    When I’m with non-NC people I feel like i have a system for interaction– I have a coping mechanism to deal with their falsities and evils and recognize I have some beautiful Truths I can share with them. But I’m still figuring out how to deal with immorality and falsities among NChristians.

    Thanks for the thought-provoking article!

    1. I never responded to this!? I really liked this comment Eden (and you). I identify with this frustration too. Living away from a New Church society I have also had a chance to become frustrated with myself as a “New Church person” because I fall short an awful lot.

      As New Church people it is much worse if we don’t live what we know is true because we have so much more information about exactly how to live. Profanation is a pretty terrifying.

  5. Wow, Dara, thank you so much for this perspective. I’m living with some of this frustration and discouragement, right now, too – as Australians are asked to voice their opinion on ‘marriage equality’, and the loudest voices are not the ones I like to hear. 🙁 With this reminder of yours, though, I will endeavour to examine my own beams! -and especially (THANK YOU) to remember that the *LORD* is in charge; I can, and must, trust Him through this all. Thanks.

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