Judgment.
Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. Don’t condemn those who are down; that hardness can boomerang. Be easy on people; you’ll find life a lot easier. Give away your life; you’ll find life given back, but not merely given back—given back with bonus and blessing.
~ Luke 6:37-38 msg
lent, 6 - shedding our need to be right
The TV is too loud!
You’re talking too softly!
You’re driving too fast!
Those prices are too high!
That house is too gaudy!
Her hair is too big!
His tan is too fake!
To play on a 1711 proverb by English poet Alexander Pope, "To judge is human, to forgive divine."
Is there anything more human, more universal than to judge people, judge circumstances, judge everything? There are few things we do not have an opinion on… and why wouldn’t we think that our opinion is the right one? Why would we doubt ourselves? Why would we suspend judgment and choose rather to be agnostic about things of which we know not? Which is most everything.
What do you mean? I know lots of things about lots of things!
I speak these words directly to myself, convicted to the core that my instinct to assess and assign all things to their appropriate place in the grand scheme is injurious to the Beloved Community, to the Kingdom that Jesus adjures us to enter. Judgment is diametrically opposed to love, which is of course the north star of virtue. Oh how far we have fallen from grace.
It’s not just others we wound with our judgments, you know. We wound ourselves. “How you see anything is how you will see everything,” says my mentor Richard Rohr. This all-encompassing worldview—that no one else sees reality as clearly as we do—boomerangs back so that we judge ourselves as harshly as we judge others. Harsh is the word. To judge is to extend a harsh eye upon all that falls within view. It is to project outward that which is darkest in ourselves: our desperate fear that we ourselves are the object of harshness!
Whoa, lighten up, dude! It’s not quite that bleak.
No, it’s not always bleak. Sometimes we are surprised by beauty, by gratuity, by unexpected kindness. These are the divine rays of hope piercing the glowering darkness of our internalized decrees. I know, it’s heavy… but we must turn on the light and expose our unconscious propensity.
If Lent is too intense for you, blow it off. Just skip over the passion and go straight to Easter. Keep it all bunnies and eggs and hallelujahs. Let’s not make anyone uncomfortable, especially ourselves.
What’s gotten into Jerome this week? He’s a hot mess.
If there is anything tearing our world apart, tearing our very souls apart, it’s our compulsive need to be right. To think we know who’s right and who’s wrong. Who’s in and who’s out. Who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Granted, occasionally it’s obvious with public leaders; more often it’s deeply nuanced, more than we are wont to admit. More obscure than we imagine. Telecasters, televangelists, bloggers, and celebrities—oh, we know right where to place them in our tidy little compartments. We enthrone them, or we damn them. Pedestals and purgatories are the bread and butter of our delicious rightness.
Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison! Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On us. On me. This Lent.
finding our way home
Pause. Consider. Who or what are you judging? Are you ready to shed that toxic posture?
takeaway
You don’t need to be right to do good.