With our souls fogged by sin we are natural hypocrites; knowing ourselves is like trying to drive in a steamed-up car. Knowing the world is about as difficult. We see what we expect to see. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it like this: “We will not see if we do not want to see—and we will only see what we want to see.”

Your intentions are often not transparent, even to you. Sin’s dark shadow means we must always think that there’s an iceberg of ourselves we haven’t fathomed, with much unseen and looming beneath the surface. The motivations for our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, even for the questions we grapple with, are more opaque than we like to think they are.

I know myself much better than I did a decade ago. It would be foolish to think that I know myself. We are very skilled at hiding ourselves from ourselves. It’s instinctive, like grabbing figs leaves to cover up something we don’t want seen, even by ourselves. Fig leaf sap is a nasty irritant, which says about everything you need to know about the human condition.

We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt over and over in ways we wouldn’t for anyone else. We allow behaviour in ourselves that deeply frustrates us in others; sometimes that’s why it frustrates us in others. With our souls fogged by sin we are natural hypocrites; knowing ourselves is like trying to drive in a steamed-up car.

Knowing the world is about as difficult. We see what we expect to see. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it like this:

“We will not see if we do not want to see—and we will only see what we want to see.”

Called into Questions, 98.

I think he’s right. Since I first read these words a year ago, they’ve been bouncing around my head. I only see what I want to see. I can’t see what I don’t want to. And, presumably, my sense of my self is blinded by sin enough that I have little awareness of this process or what it is that I wanted to see in the first place.

It’s hard to know yourself. It’s hard to know the world.

Are we stuck between a rock and a hard place? Or, perhaps better, a fuzzy indistinct thingy and a something-or-other?

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