This is a tricky and important subject. Anybody who does not live the life of a monk with a vow of silence tucked away in a mountain convent, knows about strife, about accusation, censure, critique, and criticism. It is a dear friend who shared with me this insight:
People will only accuse you of their own mistakes.
What an observation! I wish I had known this for years. But now I do. Once you know its truth and embrace the embedded potential for progress, you understand much better the fabric of conflict. At least I do. Of course, it is easier to see the mistakes of others rather than confront our own shortcomings. The entire Sermon on the Mount deals with this question, in a way. This is one side. The other is how to stay calm when being criticized unjustly. And how to accept legitimate complaint as such without arguing. Mary Baker Eddy doesn’t mince words when putting her own version of Jesus’ advice about the mote in our brother’s eye and the beam in our own eye (see Matthew 7: 3-5) into writing:
If a man is jealous, envious, or revengeful, he will seek occasion to balloon an atom of another man’s indis‐
cretion, inflate it, and send it into the atmosphere of mortal mind — for other green eyes to gaze on: he will always find somebody in his way, and try to push him aside; will see somebody’s faults to magnify under the lens that he never turns on himself. (…) Do we yet understand how much better it is to be wronged, than to commit wrong? (…) He who judges others should know well whereof he speaks. Where the motive to do right exists, and the majority of one’s acts are right, we should avoid referring to past mistakes. The greatest sin that one can commit against himself is to wrong one of God’s ‘little ones’.
Know ye not that he who exercises the largest charity, and waits on God, renews his strength, and is exalted? Love is not puffed up; and the meek and loving, God anoints and appoints to lead the line of mankind’s triumphal march out of the wilderness, out of darkness into light.
Mary Baker Eddy. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 129/130
So: People will only accuse you of their own mistakes. And if we are being manipulated into accusing others, we have a problem. We can learn to see how the urge to criticize others is melting away as the willingness to grow ourselves is deepened. It keeps us busy 24/7, this grand “warfare with one’s self”, Mary Baker Eddy mentions in an address to the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1893 (quoted in Miscellaneous Writings, p. 118). Accusing others is like using a lens – a magnifier, a camera. Use the lens of your mental camera and turn it to the hidden potential, to the soft and fluffy side of all of us, to the goodness waiting to come forward. And take a picture. In the end, we are like the two rabbits – in need of much stroking. So in this sense, this insight is a caress: “People will only accuse you of their own mistakes.”
