Mirrors only lie if they have been lied to!
Look in the mirror — are you sure you are you?
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in. ~ Alan Alda
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming. ~ Garrison Keillor
A window invites us to look through it. A mirror invites us to look into it. We need both windows and mirrors in our life. We need to look outwards and beyond and we need to look deeply within. We need to see the world at large in all its splendour and balance as well as its suffering and chaos. We need to see ourselves in all our beauty and purity as well as our compromising contradictions. What we see within and without calls for thankful praise and heartfelt lament. What we see will cause intrigue, doubt, confidence, questioning, liberation and resurrection.
Both windows and mirrors invite us to see new things and in new ways. This is one of the main reasons we gather here for worship each week: To see. To see all of creation, each other and ourselves through the window of Jesus’ healing vision of justice and equality for all and in the mirror of his accepting and engaging love of all. Authentic worship includes both windows and mirrors.
Windows get dirty and mirrors mist up. Both need cleaning from time to time to keep clarity. But here in lies a danger. We may be tempted to spend more time looking at the window than through it and at the mirror rather than into it — driven by an obsession to keep it clean. When this happens, our vision that the window had hoped to extend and which the mirror had hoped to deepen becomes myopic. We become professional window cleaners — wiping and polishing but no longer seeing or at least not seeing what the window and mirror had hoped we see. With worship we become a window cleaner when we worship the way we worship. With Church we become a window cleaner when we love our community more than the truth. With Jesus this occurs when we confuse idolising him with following him.
Where else this analogy is true in your living.
Grace, Alan
