Eventide & Altar

Can a blind person guide a blind person? Jesus asks it as an obvious question, but there's real mercy underneath it too - a warning against pretending to see more clearly than you do, especially when it comes to correcting someone else. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, and miss the beam in your own?

At this stage of life, you've likely had more chances than most to notice this pattern play out over decades - how easy it was, in younger years, to see exactly what a spouse, a sibling, a grown child needed to change, while missing your own share of the trouble entirely. Age has a way of slowly correcting that, if you let it. The beam in your own eye becomes harder to ignore the longer you've lived with yourself.

Paul describes training like an athlete - not shadowboxing, not running aimlessly, but disciplined, purposeful effort toward something real. That's a fitting image for the long project of actually seeing yourself clearly. It rarely happens in a single moment of insight. It's closer to training - repeated, patient, done over years, not all at once.

The psalm today is a comfort worth resting in: happy is the one whose strength is in the Lord, in whose heart are the pilgrim roads. Whatever clarity you've gained about yourself over the years, however long the road took, you were never walking it without help.

The Sorrowful Mysteries tonight, Friday's day. Pray them for the grace to see your own faults as clearly as you've always seen everyone else's.

• For the grace to see our own faults as clearly as we see everyone else's, we pray to the Lord.
• For patience with ourselves in the slow work of growing wiser with age, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who train themselves in patience and self-discipline, that the effort would bear fruit over time, we pray to the Lord.

Tonight, ask someone in your life to tell you honestly about one blind spot they see in you - gently, and only if you're ready to actually hear it without defending yourself.