The Splinter and the Beam and my Elderly Friend

As my friends on the Left have acquired a taste for the Bible---certain phrases seem quite useful to voice one's virtue. Yard signs of "Love Thy Neighbor", "No Place for Hate" (not a verbatim phrase in Scripture but certainly a quality of heaven), "Judge Not", and also the Pope's "Who Am I to Judge?" --- such phrases righteously admonish. If the yard signs are not enough we are doubly educated by internet, films, the magisterial morning panels as The View should we have the misfortune to have a residue of racism to dare vote for a man who would wish to have something as archaic and intolerant as borders. Of course we are told by the secular biblical scholars that borders aren't biblical, and Jesus would never build a wall.
Thus I had to reach to the bookshelf and take down and dust off this Book I needed more familiarity with. After all so many were quoting from it.

As I began reading it wasn't long when I came across: "Remove the beam out of thine own eye and then thou shalt be able to remove the splinter out of thy brother's eye."

As I pondered this passage that hadn't yet made it into a yard sign, I began to wonder at its implications for today. But there was a catalyst that excited my mind on this particular text: an elderly lady at Mass this morning. While talking to her and mentioning how I was thankful for our President, her holy face and lovely lucid eyes looked surprised. Her look wasn't quite askance but it was in that direction. And so I wasn't surprised at her question: "But isn't he very immoral?" In this elderly saint's delicate voice this judgmental word seemed foreign. How did she come to think something so contrary to her nature? My elderly friend would not have suggested even that the mobster Whitey Bulger was an immoral soul. And yet?

I had to wonder for a moment as I looked at her questioning face. She is certainly an innocent soul, my elderly friend, and I wonder at how she could so firmly believe that we had here in our President a quality of spiritual lostness that she would not have put upon Judas himself even while he held the thirty pieces in his hand or deposited the kiss upon his Friend's cheek.

I had only said that I thought we were fortunate in this age of anarchy to have such a man as President Trump at the helm. Again this elderly friend is a saint (you just know when you meet one) and has all the feminine loveliness and beauty so much of womanhood traded in for the poisoned porridge of the feminist movement. Anyhow my elderly friend followed up the questioning look with, "But what about all the things he has said?"

I knew then how our unbiased media underscored for her and so many others the choice crude remarks, the repetition, the molding of the mind with soundbites. All this while what the man has done especially in undermining the abortion industry, pushing to defund Planned Parenthood, his Court Picks, his programs to help the black youth in conjunction with Evangelical inner city pastors, his work to keep Religious Liberty alive, and other things get overshadowed by a crudity or brashness that is part of his NYC businessman's personality.

But it didn't surprise me, this response: No. I could understand the power of the six o'clock news, the monolith of mind-molding narrative that comes to us day by day, hour by hour. I could understand the susceptibility of the innocent as doves. I could understand the subtlety of the sophisticated calumny of the Never Trump narrative. I could understand that she would have the president's crude comments against his opponents in Caps, and not even be aware of the smarmy smears that are the steady graffiti vandalizing the White House. Thus with this impetus of my dear friend's consternation and puzzlement at my inexplicable praise of such an immoral man I come upon the passage in the Bible regarding the beam and the splinter and how the Left seems all too ready to elucidate the splinter, to highlight it, to italicize it, to repeat it, to feature it until it is indelible gospel written upon the collective mind of the citizenry, and my elderly friend.

As I thought of the Left's newfound love of righteousness I wondered that they readily pointed out the splinter, but seemed to neglect the beam, the beam of the freedom to break the baby in the womb, the beam of normalizing whatever is against natural law, the beam of celebrating what they seem to find so abhorrent in a few perverted priests, the schizophrenia of pushing for all kinds of sexual license while at the same time being the accusing Puritan Mr. Dimmesdale in the ME TOO movement; the beam of educating the innocence out of children; the beam of making vice virtue and virtue vice. So perhaps in the Left's newfound Love for the Word there would be some more lawn signs that could cover the splinter beam dichotomy? Perhaps some admonition to instruct us all be better and more compliant citizens of this city of man and also for the City of God; and that our tolerance and compassion and neighbor-love would mark our lawn signs to include such neighbors as Bret Kavanaugh and our President. Yes, I would hope they someday can make it into the Left's category of neighbor.