Have you ever tried combing your hair while looking at your webcam image? Try it sometime, it’s next to impossible. It seems that we are so conditioned to seeing our image in a mirror, which of course is the wrong way around, that when we see ourselves the right way around we become completely incapable of doing things we’ve been doing all our lives.
I’m drawn to reflect (pun intended) that, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul said, “Now we as as in a mirror obscurely.” In the same passage he said, “Now we know in part . . .” How much of what we think we know have we got the wrong way around? Jesus well aware of this. He was always saying, “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . . ” Richard Rohr says that one of the marks of the ego-self (the false self) is contrariness. We humans are very good at ‘putting things in the best light’ even though the truth is quite the opposite. This has been well demonstrated in political rhetoric worldwide — vividly so in America.
It’s going to be as difficult for us to reverse this trend in society as it is for us to learn to comb our hair while looking at a true representation of ourselves on the screen. But this is surely the first thing we have to learn — to see our own selves truly and to see our own true selves. Only then can we see the rest of creation aright and take the appropriate action.