Late one Friday afternoon I was at the video store (Do you remember them?) picking out a movie. While standing in line, I noticed that they had a rack of tee shirts with stunningly beautiful fractal images on their fronts. In case you don’t know what I mean, there are a couple of fractal pictures below. The actual fractal is comprised of the boundaries between the different colored regions, and they are very complicated mathematical objects. The name “fractal” comes from the fact that they have fractional dimensions. For example, a line has dimension one, the interior of a circle has dimension two, but a fractal could have dimension 1.2317 or such. The color represents the rate at which the underlying mathematical process is exploding towards infinity in that region. I could go on (and on and on and on), but suffice it to say they are fascinating.

​Back to the checkout line. As I stood there my mind wandered, and I started thinking about the shirts and their potential buyers. Should a person wear such a shirt if they didn’t understand the complicated mathematics underlying them? A saying of the Polish aphorist Stanislaus Lec came to mind: “If a man who can’t count finds a four-leaf clover, is he entitled to happiness?” Something about the situation bothered me. As I stood there, I realized that what was bothering me was that I thought of the potential buyers as being hypocrites. A little later I concluded that following that reasoning, it was hypocritical for me to buy the shirt as well, since I wasn’t an expert on fractals either, and I didn’t buy one.

Some days later, I saw that there was no hypocrisy involved. People were buying the shirts for the same reason I wanted to; they were beautiful. To this day I regret not buying one of those shirts. I think there are three lessons here. First, it is easy to see hypocrisy in others, even when it doesn’t exist. Second, it is harder to see it in ourselves. The third is a little more complicated. One criticism often leveled at the Church is that it is full of hypocrites; some of this is due to the ease of people seeing hypocrisy in others, but since we all have failings, on the whole it is a valid observation. This means that we as Christians have an obligation to examine ourselves and try to eliminate all self-righteousness. Read how Jesus scolded the Pharisees for hypocrisy (among other things) in Matthew 23:23-32, and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.
Jim