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no mote or beam

Here’s a poem pointing to everyone’s innate ability to express God’s light and love. The title refers to Jesus’ teaching about focusing on others’ “motes” – that is, judging them for their smaller faults – even as we ignore the much larger “beams,” or flaws, impacting our own ability to see clearly.

  • By Joni Overton-Jung

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
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no mote
or beam*
can mock
the shaft
of light
you are

too luminous
for night
to leave some mark

no

you are made
for light
of light
God’s light

Love’s halo rests
on you
through you

no mote
no beam

just rivulets
ripples
rivers

resplendent
dawn

*See Matthew 7:1-5

Originally published in the July 2, 2018, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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