Of Logs, Splinters and Jumping off Cliffs

When I was a kid, 12 or 13 years of age, my city would host Friday night teen dance sessions at a park which we, for obvious reasons, called the band shell. They would play that decadent music called rock and roll, and boys and girls would learn to think of each other as something more than schoolmates. My mother would never let me go. She saw Friday night at the band shell as the very cradle of corruption.

By the time I was old enough to ignore my mother, they had either discontinued dance night or I had found my own form of corruption. I don’t remember. I do recall that I would be furious at my mom and would whine to her that my friend Ricky’s parents let him go! My mother’s response -- this may sound familiar -- was “if Ricky’s parents told him he could jump off a cliff, would you want to jump off too?”

My mother figured that church youth group was a better place for me to meet my friends. Soon after those days, certain that our neighborhood was a breeding ground for juvenile delinquents and their molls, mom sent me off to Christian High School at Detroit Lutheran West. And she was right. The guys I met there were more thoughtful than those in my neighborhood, and the girls not as free with their favors.

My own children went to public high school but I also immersed them in church life and encouraged them to choose a certain kind of friend. As much as I hate to admit it, my mother’s wisdom, if not her paranoia, wore off on me. And her strategy of finding a world apart, a healthier soil if you will, in which to raise her crop of children, turned out to be a good one. Bringing up kids in our culture is no rose garden. You need to look for an edge.

Maybe it was because she always saw herself on the defensive, but my mother did what she did without ever teaching us to think ourselves morally superior to anyone else, or the others morally inferior to us. Assigning white hats and blacks hats was never the game. It was always just a matter of carving out our own space where we could have freedom do the right thing. To paraphrase her “jumping off a cliff” metaphor, she was saying “we’re not talking about them; we’re talking about us.”

Jesus has an oft-quoted though infrequently followed parable along those same lines which suggests we focus more on removing “the log” from your own eye and less on taking splinters from the eyes of our neighbors. I don’t know if it was my mother, Jesus, or a Christian upbringing heavy on the idea that we’re sinners in need of God’s grace that makes me distrustful of people and nations who claim the moral high ground. I can generally see enough logs in their eyes to keep them busy. But while I’m working on my own logs, they are jumping ahead to their neighbor’s splinters without first clearing up their own vision.

I was reminded of all this by an obscure story I read earlier this week, in which the question of logs vs. splinters was implicit. Our president dined with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and among the guests was British historian Simon Schama, who long before our current Middle Eastern intervention observed that Europe regards the moral rhetoric of America as a cover for self-interest. Apparently, everyone behaved themselves at the dinner because that part of the story never made the cable newscasts. One wonders whether our news people have the nuanced power of perception that would allow them to comprehend such a question.

But even if they don’t, it doesn’t absolve us as Christians from seeing a better way to a better world. We lead, if we are to lead at all, by example. We lead by being honest with ourselves, and not by trying to fix the game so we look good winning. We lead by sincere devotion to our own standards, by dedication to our own gardens. We lead, as my mother did, not by condemning the neighbors for letting their kids go wherever they wanted, but by simply saying “in our house, this is how we do it.”