We are all familiar with the maxim that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. It speaks to the truism that people tend to criticize others for faults they themselves have but fail to see.
In contemporary parlance, we talk about situational or personal awareness, which are catchphrases we often use to characterize those who seem oblivious to the nuances of certain situations or their personal habits. There is an implied superiority, which tacitly asserts that we would never find ourselves in similarly compromised situations, with the apparently inevitable result of people criticizing us behind our backs.
However, these examples of the foibles of human nature betray an Achilles heel: they are all directed at other people, not ourselves. Another failing of our nature is that we have an uncanny ability to find exculpatory evidence in every situation that conveniently holds us harmless.
Although it is not uniformly positive, a value of being older is that there is a decades-long record of our behavior at every stage of our development. When we look with a retrospective eye to the distant past, we find that the further back we go, the more inclined we are to reflexively revise the truth. The fact that we tell ourselves that we are now a materially different person with a far higher moral bearing only seems to magnify our incredulity at certain behaviors we exhibited. We may naturally recoil from the memory, which is why we often find ourselves examining the facts as we think others perceived them, for real or imagined evidence to defray responsibility.
As is so often the case, we can turn to Scripture for instruction. An apt verse is Matthew 7:5: Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam from thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
The message is that we tend to exaggerate or magnify the faults of others while minimizing our own, which are, in fact, far greater; and we must first correct our own faults before presuming to criticize the faults of others.
To see more graphically what Jesus was teaching, if we look to the original Greek, we learn that the word for faults when applied to others is karphos, which translates as “speck” or “small splinter.” When Jesus refers to the “beam,” which is in our eye, we learn that the Greek word is dokon, which translates as a “beam of wood.”
The truth is that if we are entirely candid with ourselves, we must conclude that we all live in glass houses. Indeed, understanding our faults is the first step to owning them, and humility is at the helm of that effort. If we soften our internal voice through heartfelt prayer, we inevitably become more willing to look first at our own behavior.
Recall that at the beginning of Mass we recite what was formerly called the Confiteor. We are confessing our sins, what we have done and failed to do, and then we ask the “blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.” [Emphasis added]
When we are at Mass reciting memorized prayers, it is easy to slide by the fact that, in this instance, each person is asking everyone else for their prayers to the Lord. That is a profound request, and an explicit inference that each of us needs prayers, that we are flawed, spiritually bruised, and damaged. We can more honestly ask for prayers if we first recognize the fragility of our nature, that we are always susceptible to sin, just a moment away from harming another with a harsh word or thought.
Therein lies the key to living comfortably in a glass house: scrupulously aligning our thoughts with our behavior, rewriting the script of our internal dialogue that is often prone to think ill of others. With time, we find that our default inclination is a reflexive kindness and a disciplined form of prior restraint in expressing any thought which our Lord would find objectionable.
There seem to be innumerable definitions of happiness, from a sense of contentment to a satisfaction with one’s place in life. We might also ponder Robert Frost’s adage that “Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.” But an enduring happiness is one that is internally directed, that scans the soul for imperfections, confesses sins, and asks our Lord for forgiveness and mercy. We can then smile at the universe, for we know that in the words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Philip E. Mella