Judgment! Not many of us I daresay
are envious of
those who make the laws of society or those who must preside
over the
enforcement or the interpretation of that law’s fine points. And yet, if we are
completely honest, moral
and ethical judgment does have a place in the exercise of all
our minds.
It
is with a chastised spirit that I must admit that that kind of
judgment had a
very central place in much of my early adult life as a
theological
graduate. I confused
God’s judgment with
my own. It took me many
years to
understand that just because I could work up a big head of
righteous steam over
an issue did not mean that I could assume that my fervor and
fume were inspired
of God. In retrospect I
have nothing but
the most bleeding heart sympathy for those poor parishioners who
had to weather
my storms issuing forth from what was in fact my bully pulpit. Not that all my sermons
were in bad taste or
irrelevant; I just got carried away at times being dogmatic –
and enjoyed doing
it.
But
of course the urge toward absolutes has not gone away, any more
than the desire
for a drink leaves an alcoholic who goes on the wagon. I still have fantasies in
which I tell off
people I dislike. It is
not a wish for
them to die, because dead they would be out of their misery. It is a wish for them to
live and be very
much in their misery. The
seeds of
fascism are right there in my psyche, I daresay in all our
psyches. I am sometimes
frightened by their presence.
People
we do not like are not going to go away.
I cannot think of a more appropriate Purgatory than
spending the first
so many years of eternity locked into a room with people I have
wrongly
judged! There is no way
out. You don’t get to
have visits from people you
like or those you treated fairly.
You do
not even get to sleep. You
have nothing
to do but make arrangements, come to terms with all these many
seemingly
detestable individuals. That
would be
enough to purge the hell out of anybody.
Sometimes
we might find ourselves calling one of our singular traits by a
different name
when we espy it in another person.
Let
us consider some examples.
She/he
is hateful! ---- I’m passionate and righteously indignant!
She/he
is opinionated! ---- I have the strength of my convictions!
She/he
is overbearing! ---- I’m persistent and persevering!
She/he
is slow! ---- I’m thorough!
She/he
is impatient! ---- I believe in forthright action!
She/he
is absent-minded! ---- I have a lot on my mind!
She/he
is controversial! ---- I’m an innovator!
She/he
is withdrawn, distant and snobbish! ---- I value my privacy!
She/he
is a pain in the butt! ---- I’m a force to contend with!
She/he
is wishy-washy! ---- I’m open-minded!
She/he
is a conformist! ---- I’m a team player!
They’re
dirty rebels! ---- We’re revolutionaries!
They’re
brainwashed! ---- We’re enlightened!
We
could go on and on, with many more examples.
God’s
judgment, unlike our own, does not require a spectacle of
litigation or some
exhibitionist event, no “Hear ye, Hear ye, this court is now in
session.” God’s judgment
is the working out of the
moral law. It occurs
ever so subtly
sometimes. We are not
punished for our
sins; we are punished by our sins.
From
within! David was
punished from
within. The death of his
baby was not
his punishment for having Uriah killed and stealing his wife
Bathsheba. He and the
recorders of that history only
construed it to be so. He
was punished
from within, following his confrontation with the prophet
Nathan, who unearthed
his secret. Henceforth,
he had to look
in the mirror and see a different kind of man, a fallible man,
prone to the
same evils as anyone else. He
had to
give up the idea that his royal discretion was one and the same
with the mind
of God. His self-image
would never be
the same.
Our
righteous judgments constitute what I believe is the most
dangerous thing about
us human beings – our most lethal weapon.
A mindset that attempts to close the gap between human
judgment and
divine judgment is an extremely dangerous one, as events in the
news are
currently demonstrating. Under
the guise
of nationalism or religious fervor millions have been
slaughtered, lives
uprooted, terrorist activity has been unloosed in our streets,
and the bully
pulpits of politicians and radical clerics have incited
otherwise decent people
to hotheaded bigotry and sometimes violence.
In
the previous years of my life when Presidential campaigning was
conducted, I
seem to remember that mud was slung between candidates but that
it was
generally a soft oozy, mutually respectful mud.
I remember Jimmy Carter, after some candid and cutting
debates with
Gerald Ford, expressing appreciation to Ford immediately after
winning the
White House, praising Ford’s spunk and courage.
And though Richard Nixon lives in infamy because of
contemptible things
he did after getting into office, I recall how upon the occasion
of his first
term victory he was full of praise for his losing opponent
Hubert Humphrey,
calling him a great fighter who had had to contend against
terrible odds after
the assassination of Robert Kennedy. “I
admire a fighter”! And
one could tell
that he meant it.
In
the current contest the mud has not been all that soft and oozy;
it has often
been hardboiled and rocklike in texture.
Some of the judgmental remarks that have passed between
the candidates
have not been of a gaming nature, but warlike and downright
nasty. It is one thing
to find fault; it is quite
another to demonize. I
wonder how
mutually respecting the two people nominated will be this time,
when the
bloodletting ceases upon the election of one or the other. The Presidency, as the
founding fathers
conceived of it, is not a bully pulpit; it is a tough rigorous
job, one that
should give pause to anyone who first sets foot in the West
Wing. But I have been
given to wonder of late
whether this bitter, seemingly unprecedented behavior will have
set a new
precedent for our nation’s future.
Have
the waters been so badly polluted that the art of open-minded
compromise, the
greatest of all anti-pollutants, will get lost? I pray my fears will prove
unwarranted.
To read other
entries in my
blog, please consult its website:
enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the
website the
blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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