How do you see an elephant?
There are many angles to a story. The number of angles, perhaps, would correspond to the number of characters in that story, as each one of them sees the story through different eyes.
A good example of contrasting views would be the poem The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe. The poem begins:
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind)
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind
They thought the elephant is like a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, or a rope, depending on which part of the elephant they touched. This ensued to a heated discussion among them:
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
The poem concludes:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
I think it is the same with life. Like the blind men, we grope around certain issues, our elephants, and judge it to be this and that, according to our differing worldviews, or personal biases. And then like the blind men, we would fight because everyone would claim that they are right.
In Matthew 7:3-5, Jesus said “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Could it be that when Jesus spoke these, he used a plank in the eye to illustrate our biases? Certainly, a plank in the eye would be an obstruction to vision, that is why He said that it should be removed first so that one can see clearly.
Leave a Reply