July 05, 2011
Luke 6.37-38
"Pass no judgement, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Acquit, and you will be acquitted. Give, and gifts will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap; for whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt to you in return."
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I’m fighting this scripture. Justifications galore for why I want to judge: my enemies deserve it, my work requires it (legal cases), a time for everything, and I enjoy it!
This is emphatically not "Thou shalt not judge!"
It's a lot more like: "Be careful about this; you could be very sorry if you aren't."
Christianity with this precept... would be an entirely different beast than it has been, all these years, without it!
But everyone enjoys passing judgements, it's like a number of other habits that feel great at the time, and have unfortunate side effects.
I used to think of this in tit for tat terms. If you are less judgmental, people will remember this and let you slide on things. If you are generous, people will remember this and help you out when you need it. While I think there is truth to this, these days I see stronger truth. If you are less judgmental of others, you will learn to be less judgmental/more accepting of your self. If you are generous, you will see the true value of things, and learn to live a simpler, happier life.
[I've forgotten how this begins]
"... and wonder if I've lived
to overripen.
A fly tries to tell me something
I don't want to listen to
while I remember, without nostalgia
times I had the faith
to curse God.
I've decided to live with myself,
and "Thank You for the peanut butter!"
[me ~ 1983]
Forrest, thanks. Ichabod, too.
Took my chances with that post.
I’m thinking to myself about judging, after finding myself mid-air (literally mid-air) during a recent run in the wide open deserts of the Great Basin, and boom, I’m jumping reflexively in mid-air and in tachycardia from about 250,000 to 400,000 (give or take a few million) years of reflexive-hard wired judgment – because I encountered a non-venomous gopher snake biologically capable of mimicking a rattler (who has time to think?).
After biological reflexive judgment ended, I stopped to go into my neurosis of the post-Aristotelian form of ‘judgment’ – how do I fit this snake into taxa (and, before or after I kill it?)?
After that, another cognitive judgment. I let the snake live. Forrest, it was a SNAKE! Hear me! Feel me! I let it live. I blessed it. I thanked it.
After that, another judgment after going back to running – thinking judgmentally to myself I let that slinking mythopoetic cosmogon live! After what it did to ME?
While running, yet more judgment – thinking of Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now,” in his glorious final homily, preaching that we must make friends with moral terror by a cathartic exorcism from ourselves of — judgment. Because it’s – judgment – that ruins us.
Now I come here to this blog for some love and warmth. And I end up having my best friend, Jesus, tell me to go where Kurtz went – insane! – because I am forbidden judgment?
So now, thanks for a little ...
... salvation!
Cheers,
Jim
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