Self Examination Comes First
A Chinese proverb teaches: Think of your faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and of the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep.
This is an affirmation of Jesus’s teaching that it is vital to remove the plank in one’s eye first then one will see clearly to remove the speck in the neighbor’s eye, (Matthew 7:3-5). We are in a world where everyone has flaws and shortcomings, but the approach to overcoming our flaws and helping others to overcome their flaws must be positive and never negative. Those with negative judgmental tendencies would ordinarily like to focus on other people’s mistakes and quickly react to such, with negative reactions like destructive criticism, condemnation, character assassination and fostering avenues to have others well battered and disgraced, rather than look at their own shortcomings and look for ways to overcome such. The right approach in any way does not suggest turning blind eyes to people’s errors and when needed to be objectively corrected, that is left undone because we do not feel like creating an impression of judging people’s fault. Rather, it is an invitation to appreciate the culture of self-evaluation as a credible step in helping oneself and others in overcoming shortcomings and flaws. It is looking at one’s faults and mistakes and making efforts to get that corrected day by day as a standard to help others to make right choices even if we are to bring them to the table of correction in a loving manner. One cannot be guilty of an offence and then still have the audacity to be correcting co-offenders; such correction has no credibility and can never yield any positive outcome. It must be a reality of coming to equity with clean hands.
It should not be a case of covering up one’s faults and then focusing on those who make little mistakes as the demons to be crucified and never having a disposition to make them feel loved and supported in any way. The journey to better living begins with self-examination, self-evaluation, discovering one’s shortcomings and accepting the wholistic strategies to become better day by day. The quest for self-examination is never geared towards condemning oneself but to know and accepting the reality that nobody is perfect overnight or holiness/wholeness is a continuous journey not a destination reached at once. It is a reality of continuous journey that will be on-going as much as one is alive not just once- for -all event or process.
With the process of regular self-examination, one discovers how far one is going in the right direction and how one’s pitfalls or flaws can hinder progressive development in one’s journey of life. It is never aimed to put the lens on our mistakes to make us feel dejected or depressed but to discover our shortcomings as hindrances to our desire to objective happiness, thus desiring to keep working on such flaws with the grace of God so that we get them rooted out of our being. Some of the vices in us have their connections to our backgrounds and we are not even fundamentally responsible for them having a place in our being, but as we grow, they become negative habits that constitute obstacles to our desired goal/ happiness. It is through regular self-examination, we discover such negative traits and how they really affect our character and reputation and with frantic efforts, we progress regularly in rooting them out expectedly.
Putting the lens on oneself rather than always principally looking at other people’s conduct destructively will help us in molding ourselves to become better in conduct and choices, thus becoming inspirational for others, even for those who have reputation of chronic bad choices. What matters in changing people who opt for bad choices is to have good models who set the pace in good choices. People really learn from good exemplary lifestyles of those around them rather than from the culture of destructive criticism and outright condemnation.
One cannot objectively correct others of their wrong choices when the one correcting is also immersed in wrong choices and hypocritically hiding such. The courage to correct others lies in the reality of not being guilty as the offender. The clarion call to remove the plank in our eyes is just to present us with the standard of correcting flaws in others, that is, a good reputation, a good character is what makes correcting ills in others for wrong choices plausible, acceptable and fruitfully possible. Becoming a credible pacesetter for others in good choices becomes a vital aspect of our religious experience and not just living a double standard life and being quick to jump aggressively on others for their shortcomings. True Christian experience will never accept hypocrisy and destructive criticism of others as the ideal of Christian conduct. We are to keep working on ourselves day by day so as to be credible sources of good conduct for all and sundry. That is only possible through regular self-examination and upholding the daily culture of examination of conscience. According to a philosopher: A life unexamined is not worth living.
2 Corinthians 13. Galatians 6.
Fr. Emmanuel Alao