Cleaning Our Lenses

Imagine that each of us are born with a complete set of virtue-lenses, paradigms by which we’re capable of viewing the world in its proper light. Some of these lenses enable us to see life through perspectives such as (but not limited to) love, justice, freedom and order. Each of these lenses are undeveloped at first. Through time, experience and choices, some of these lenses develop or degrade. A young child may quickly switch from the lens of justice when a toy of theirs is taken, to the lens of love and forgiveness a moment later. A young adult may develop a keen perspective for freedom while their authorities are attempting to administer and maintain order.

Each virtue-lens enables us to decipher truth from error but if any of them are clouded then our virtues can become varying degrees of vices. Much like the lesson from the parable – The Blind Men and The Elephant, an incomplete witness of what is true can lead to faulty conclusions. By matching the columns (clouded lenses) with their respective rows (clean lenses), the following table depicts examples of some vices that we might gravitate towards if one paradigm is clear but another isn’t.

Virtue-blind-spots can be catastrophic to our spiritual journey. Each of us are inclined towards certain virtues but not others. For example, freedom and order seem to be diametrically opposed ideals and so very few people take their opposing view seriously. In his short book, The Enoch Letters, Neil A. Maxwell pointed out that among the righteous, “liberty does not rob order, and order does not mock liberty.” Understanding how our inclinations towards certain virtues can result in the negligence of others helps us to avoid traps we are likely to fall into. It guides our development in a well-rounded, balanced direction.

Approaching disagreements with the understanding that the other person is probably partly right is more likely to open minds and hearts than approaching disagreements with the assumption that the other person is absolutely wrong. Most people have good intentions and valuable perspectives; it’s often the completeness of those perspectives that determine the degree to which they’re correct or not. When our love and justice lenses are clean, we can love the sinner and hate the sin. When our love, justice and freedom lenses are clean we will voluntarily help the needy. When our freedom, justice and order/authority lenses are clean we will want to respect the freedom of others insomuch as they are doing no direct harm to anyone else.

Just like it’s necessary for someone who is visually impaired to wear corrective lenses to see where they’re going physically, it’s even more imperative that we keep each of our virtue-lenses clean so that we can see where we’re eternally headed. Taking a holistic approach to our progression will mean that we will seek improvement in all virtues of life and we will recognize the risks of focusing on some virtues at the expense of others.