I love beautiful things. I mean, don’t we all?

Christmastime seems to me to be a time especially for beautiful things, and so I love Christmastime. When outdoors everything is just a bit deader, a bit darker, a bit less warm (at least in my hemisphere), we do our best to make up for it on the inside! We light more candles, put lights on everything, build bigger fires, buy grander gifts, and eat and drink with a little more festivity.

It reminds me of life, of living. My world, the world, our world is sad and broken and hate-filled. When I have my moments of lucidity and honesty, I can admit that I, too, am sad and broken and hate-filled. My relationships are tinged with sadness and brokenness and hate. I don’t know about you, but it seems that I am always somewhat in the process of mourning and attempting to make right all of that.

And then I turn to beautiful things to remind me that God has not washed his hands of this world, of me, or of my relationships. I turn to stare at the startling ocean of Grace that suffuses every piece of the world with love and good and beauty. Not one thing remains untouched, even when I cannot begin to see it, though I strain my eyes. I turn back again to the Good work which God has given me to do: creating, suffusing, and sharing Love and Beauty wherever I go, as best I can, for the sake of all of us.

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For our last two Christmastimes, my little family has cut down our own little Christmas tree. On the weekend after Thanksgiving, we drive up into the mountains and embark on a search. (We try to drive until we find snow for the kids to sled and pelt me with snowballs; we are not always successful; I am not always disappointed. 😉 )

When you go to the Wild to cut down your own tree, you can be fairly certain of one thing: your tree will be quirky, relatively sparse, and whimsically asymmetrical. It will not be perfectly, impeccably beautiful. And I love it. Because today the imperfection of our tree is reminding me of the sad, broken hate that I must mourn and wrestle every day. And today its red-and-green Beauty, decorated half-heartedly with love by my boys, is reminding me that God and Grace and Love have won, are winning, and will win.

So this season, whenever I’m feeling sucked into the vortex of sadness, brokenness, or hate, I’m going to stare just for a moment into the quirky red-and-green of a certain lodgepole pine in my living room. May the mini green and red lights blind me with beauty, like the very Love of God.

{First, a quick side note. This week is a big week for me. It is Final Edit Week. I’m submitting Passions Trilogy to the printer this Friday: Friday the 13th. Hm. And yikes! (I think the Yikes! is more about the final-final-must-be-perfect edits than the superstition of the day. Also, incidentally, why is it that self-imposed deadlines feel so much more complicated(?) or imposing(?) – or something? – than deadlines handed down to you by someone else? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, a deadline is a deadline and I’m going to make it, people. Here goes nothing.)}

So, just to stay in touch with you this week, here is a little thought, a little note, a little commentary on something I read a few months ago that I’ve been mulling over ever since. Maybe you’d like to mull, too. 🙂

It was from an old, not very well known book by Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light: Reflections on the Free Life. It was, for me, a redefinition of heresy. Eugene said:

The word heresy comes from the Greek word meaning “choose.” The heretic is a person who chooses a single item out of the entire body of truth and, ignoring or denying the rest of it, makes that privately preferred and chosen truth the only truth, and teaches others to do the same. Heresy is the choice of a fraction instead of the integer. Insofar as the heretic gets others to see only that fragment and ignore the rest, he blocks access to the organic fullness of all reality, of God. There is simplification in that choice (that is the attraction), but there is also immense impoverishment. The heretic solves our problems by reducing our lives.

Here’s what I’ve been mulling over, my restatement of what Eugene said. Not that he needs my help.

Heresy is not so much exactly wrong belief, like I always thought it was. Heresy is wrongful emphasis or prioritization of belief. It is taking one belief (right or wrong) and isolating it from its proper landscape of all Belief, all Truth. It is deciding arbitrarily that one belief (right or wrong) is more important than all other beliefs. I say ‘arbitrarily’ because if any human (no matter what their spiritual or ecclesiastical or organizational credentials) is doing the deciding, it must be arbitrary! – because no human is God, the Judge and Truth-maker. All of us do this every time we take one Bible verse or one particular phrase and give it supreme reign, worshipping the belief itself and our conviction that we’ve got it right instead of allowing the belief and our convictions about it to live within their proper place alongside all other verses and phrases under God, who we worship.

I’ve also been mulling over these self-reflective questions, looking for heresy in my life, finding it everywhere: What beliefs/practices are most important to me? Why? What if those beliefs/practices, while not unimportant, are not actually the most important beliefs/practices to God? Do I have the kind of willing heart that will let God level out my beliefs/practices, matching them with his own? What fractions am I choosing over the integer? What gorgeous integers am I missing out on? How am I being a heretic by oversimplifying the beautiful, messy, mysterious, complex life that is the Way, Truth, and Life of Jesus?

Happy mulling. (What a great word for this autumnal time of year, right? Mulled cider. Mulled wine. And what a great word for what God’s work often looks like in us — or at least in me. It takes me awhile to see and to understand and to change. I usually need time to mull.)

Last week I got a splendid email from my friend Jen about — you guessed it: Judgment. She shared so transparently, wrote with such penetrating introspection, and gave such a brilliant example of an everyday struggle that I felt I had to share it with you all. Jen graciously gave me her permission to publish her letter (thank you muchly, Jen!) and so here it is:

I wanted to tell you that your last two posts have resonated so deeply with me because I have been acutely and painfully aware of my struggle with being judgmental for quite a long time now. I actually think there may have been a time when I was a young child that I was quite grace-filled and loving, but she’s been gone for a long time now, and I miss her! Being raised a Conservative Baptist, now in recovery, judgment of others has been engrained into my thoughts and responses virtually since I was in the womb. It has also been something I have tried to work on and change for many years, and while I have made a little progress, I still get very discouraged by my automatic condescending holier-than-thou responses to others.

I have a great example of that from just yesterday. I was sitting in front of the window at my favorite coffee shop downtown. Parking is always at a premium there, and there is a space right in front that should be a spot but is not. I am always tempted to pull into it (it just SITS there, empty, beckoning me!), thinking “I’m only going to be here a couple minutes while I run in for my coffee, it won’t be a big deal if I park here.” But my law-abiding conscience talks me out of it, and with some resentment I expand my search looking for a legal spot. God forbid that I have to walk a couple blocks for my coffee! So today as I was sitting at the window with that spot right in front of me, I saw two different people park there, and my immediate thought was “I can’t beLIEVE they are going to park there!! What kind of person ignores the obvious fact that there is no marked space there. InconCEIVable (in my best Princess Bride impression), and so rude! I hope they can see my disapproving look behind the reflections on the window.” And then I almost immediately got a little queasy in my stomach as I was forced to sit in the company of my own indignant, self-righteous, unpleasant self. I felt even worse when I saw that the first person was there for about 30 seconds while he dropped off a stack of free newspapers, and the second one was there about the same amount of time to drop someone off. Neither one was actually parking there. I shook my head in discouragement that my efforts at pursuing more grace, less judgment have been so ineffectual, especially because I didn’t do it just once, but TWICE within about 15 minutes of each other for the Exact. Same. Thing. Deep sigh…

I contemplated my rotten response for awhile with an appropriate dose of guilt and some not so appropriate shame. But as I pondered it with some resignation, I had a thought that gave me a little glimmer of hope, a sense that perhaps I haven’t completely failed. I realized that, while I still want to have a more grace-filled and compassionate automatic response to my fellow travelers, I’m not where I used to be. It occurred to me that perhaps the baby steps toward developing a more graceful response start with changing my response to my response. The first thoughts come pretty quickly, almost instantaneously. Stopping them has proved nearly impossible. But if I can see them for what they are, quickly, and then choose to react to that response differently before I inflict pain and shame, then maybe I’ve come a little closer to that distant goal of Christ-likeness. I can name the reaction as the judgment that it is, and then I can intentionally choose compassion. With that in mind, it occurred to me that my follow-up reaction to my immediate reaction has become much kinder and gentler a little more often, and that the transition between the two happens much faster. And I am quicker to apologize for the biting remarks that slip through before I get my filter turned on. Though my first reaction is all too often still one of harsh judgment, I transition more easily into a softer loving stance of acceptance. I retreat more hastily from the higher ground to which I have wrongly ascended, to take a position of humility and awareness of my own plank in my eye. I have not yet figured out how to stop the initial mental response of judgment, but I have gotten much quicker to initiate a second response that says “You’re doing it again, Jen. How about if you just worry about being kind and loving, and let the meter readers worry about who is parking illegally?” That second response has actually softened how I behave toward others, and while I would like the initial response to be better, I think I’m moving in the right direction.

Just some thoughts on an issue that is very challenging for me. Thank you for walking this journey openly, vulnerably, and authentically. Though I know I don’t travel it alone, it helps to be reminded that there are loving companions within reach. I appreciate your willingness to bypass easy platitudes in order to get to the really difficult and awkward stuff. Grace finds it roots and thrives there.

Love, Jen

I promise I’m not trying to beat a dead horse. From the fantastic conversations I keep having about judgment, I am learning that the horse is still very alive. In all of us. So I’m just keeping the conversation going this week. And I sincerely thank those of you who are joining in, whether I know about it or not.

For today, I want to say one main thing: The non-judgment experiment is about you and what God desires to do in your heart.

It is not about other people getting away with doing wrong things. People everywhere are always getting away with doing all kinds of wrong things. Our judgment will never ever make the slightest dent in that, rest assured. (I know that might sound terrifying on one hand, but take a look at the other hand! Isn’t it incredibly freeing??)

The entire judgment experiment is, in fact, not really about other people at all. Any potential change in posture toward other people will be a byproduct of the main thing. The main thing is God and what he is doing in and through me.

It is not about what I’m doing or not doing. To be honest, I’m not sure if my actions have changed at all since I started the experiment. It is only my heart that has changed. Maybe my actions will change someday, but that is of no concern to me at this point. My judging-addicted heart is the prominent subject.

It is not about my dumbing down into an ignorant, hear-no-evil-see-no-evil, discernment-less child. It is about freeing me from the hatred, the bitterness, and the pride that judgment invisibly threatens to build up in my heart.

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Relatedly, I offer you my re-write of a short excerpt from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount Matthew 7:1-5:

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. How can you be concerned about the wart that is on your brother’s arm, but do not do anything about the stage IV colon cancer that is ravaging your organs? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘You really need to get that wart removed,’ when you are so crippled with cancer? You hypocrite! First finish your surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments, and then if you’re still alive, you can mention the wart to your brother.”

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So, my best suggestion is: Just try it. It is only an experiment. Just try practicing not-judging for a month and see where it leads you.

If “judgment” seems too big a monster to tackle, might I make a suggestion for simplifying things? Pay attention to just one label or category (for people, organizations, books, music, etc.) you use often. Then eliminate that label for a month. (One example: Stop using the labels “Christian” / “non-Christian.”) See how it goes.

If the experiment leads you to more freedom, more compassion, more trusting God than trusting your own self-assessments, then you’ll know that it is indeed the Way of Jesus.

A warning as you begin: If at first you feel fear, guilt, or like your “rights” are being wrenched from you, stick with it! Those might first appear as signs of “I’d turn back if I were you,” BUT no! They are all of the natural feelings you will experience when something you’ve held onto for so long is put on the altar of transformation. Push through it; it’ll get less scary over time.

Here’s the good(?) news: If, in the end, you hate the results, you can always just go back to how you are now. Life as you know it will always be there waiting for you. But what if the results give you a freedom you’ve never known…??

Today is September 20. Start today and you can be done with the experiment on October 20. (Perfect – right before Halloween, and just in time to get back at it, judging all those slutty tramps for their way-too-skimpy costumes! Ha! Funny? Not funny? Sorry. I couldn’t help it. OR maybe the experiment will change you and skimpy costumes will be the least of your worries…)

A few of you have reached out to me, humbly, to say that my little non-judgment experiment has made you a bit uncomfortable. I must admit that I am very encouraged by the reports of discomfort! Partly because it helps me know that I am not alone. And partly because is must mean we’re growing! After all, how can transformative change happen at al in our minds and lives unless we pass over the hill of minor intellectual discomfort? It was Henry Cloud who taught me that, “People only change when it becomes more uncomfortable [painful] to stay the same.” So then, if we are feeling uncomfortable, we must be changing! And if we let ourselves be guided by the Spirit of God, we can be confident that we will be led in the direction of change for the Better.

We Westerners seem to be masters at comfort and avoidance, and so we must also be masters at getting stuck in our ways! We tend to be masters at arriving and then happily staying put. Culturally, we are mere novices at growth and moving onward.

Anyway, a few of you have asked me to elaborate a bit on this experiment, especially through the lenses of discernment vs judgment and also truth vs grace. I am thrilled to keep the conversation going, but must admit my lack of expertise and scholarship in this area, and so I submit to you just a few of my immediate thoughts.

In my mind, one of the most important questions in the conversation about judgment is: What actually changes people?

Being told that/how I need to change has almost never changed me. Has it worked for you? Likewise, being held in obvious disapproval by someone (for whatever reason) has never been a catalyst for lasting, freeing change. On the sparing occasions that a person’s voiced or silent disapproval has impacted me, my motivation was primarily guilt, fear, or shame — none of which are the means and ends of the Spirit of God. You may argue that the ends justify the means, and that, for example, it is better for a person to be yelled angrily into giving up cigarettes than to be gently, kindly given the freedom to continue smoking. I would argue that God’s spiritual, motivational economy seems to me to be plainly, simply, entirely different than that of humans. The psychological cost of the angry yelling may not be, in God’s estimation of things, worth the physical pay-off of the person’s no longer regularly ingesting tobacco.

Freedom is [one way to say what is] the aim of God for every living soul. The mystics say that, “Our greatest task in life is to become free.” The early Christian writer Paul chimes in, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”

Would a person experience greater freedom if she were not addicted to cigarettes? Maybe. It depends. Perhaps freedom from cigarettes would unleash an even greater flood of even worse addictions, were she to give up cigarettes at this time. Would the cigarette smoker experience greater freedom (being fully known and truly loved?) in her friendship with you if you told her that cigarettes are bad and that you think she should stop smoking them? Maybe. Probably not. Doesn’t she probably already know that cigarettes aren’t good for her? Doesn’t everyone pretty much know that? Aren’t there things that you know are bad that you still do all the time? Would someone’s telling you that they think that those things you do are bad help you quit? Would an expert Christian’s published theological statement saying they are bad change you? Would someone withdrawing their relationship with you until you quit doing the bad things change you? I have found that there are actually very few things that people need me to tell them are good or bad. Even my young children can intuit most good and bad.

However, yes. I know that there may be just a few – ahem – moral issues about which you and your neighbor disagree. You think it’s permissible, they think it’s wrong. Or you think it’s wrong and they think it’s fine, or even good. Well, welcome to the world. Isn’t it great?! People disagree. Harmony is over-rated. I am sure that I disagree with every single person on this planet about at least one thing – and I’m so grateful! My kids are beginning to disagree with me – thinking for themselves, being formed by God and others for better and for worse, growing up, becoming the particular iteration of themselves that God intends them to be. We ought to be celebrating this, not shaming it.

Unity is not unison, but rather letting Love and Relationship beat out intellectual, moral agreement in one’s life priorities. And the quality of Love and Relationship is best measured by the amount of freedom it offers each party.

So: If you feel like you must tell someone that you think it is wrong to do what they think is good, then you have the freedom to do so. And, you also have the freedom not to do so. Which is the greater freedom, I wonder?

Don’t get me wrong – you have complete freedom to continue to think that whatever-it-is is wrong; I am just asking you to consider whether your “need to stand up for what is right” or “need for them to know where you stand” is based on your own ego / pride / faulty people-pleasing sensibilities and less on freedom, unity, and “love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you.” Are you communicating your views for their sake or for yours? Maybe their lifestyle is really hurting them, but will telling them that you think it is hurting them bring about more freedom, unity, love, and change? For both of you? If not, then maybe their self-harming lifestyle is actually less harmful than the harm your words will bring.

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Lastly, at least for now. Two things:

All of this judging of others seems so insignificant, so wasteful, and so lame when I hold it up to all of the “mowing” that needs to be done in my own yard. The amount of work still left to do overwhelms me daily. I cannot even come close to keeping up with it. I am so far behind that it would be darkly comical for me to offer to help anyone else with their yard work. I think I just mean that I feel very deeply the reality of the “plank in my own eye” against the “speck in my brother’s.” I care very much about the people around me, but, try as I might, hardly any of my attempts at “mowing” in their lives have changed them at all. My mowing has certainly not led to more freedom for both of us. Isn’t it all I can do to live with, toward, and alongside them in a way that gracefully encourages them to do their own mowing?

We are not meant to live Grace and Truth. We are meant to live just Grace. Truth can be Grace sometimes. But Grace is the aim, the end, and the means. Grace is It.

I pray sincerely that these last two things will especially become more and more true for all of us who are seeking to find and live the Jesus Way.

I’m doing an experiment. I guess it is pretty simple, but excruciatingly challenging.

I am trying not to judge anyone for anything. I am doing my best not to draw lines, not to put myself in the place of God, approving or disapproving of humans, and rather to attempt to see every human as just human, as primarily a human doing their best with what they’ve got.

A few of you may accuse my experiment of being stupid because it appears at first glance to lack discernment. Never fear: I am not sending my small children away in cars with strangers with candy and moustaches; I am not throwing money at every sob story that comes my way; I’m not abandoning my brain – I’m actually using it more, for the sake of Love.

I am just choosing to do my best to see people differently, to avoid all Jocelyn-made categories except for the fundamental category of human: imago dei (image bearer of God). In so doing, I am setting my aim at love and compassion and empathy for them in my heart instead of the inevitable byproducts of judgment (for me, at least, usually superiority or insecurity – whatever it is, it is usually not love).

Like I said, simple, maybe, but oh so difficult.

My motivation comes from three sources, primarily.

1. Last year I read the book Repenting from Religion (Boyd) and was given a new perspective on Genesis 1-3. You can read more about that here. And here. And here. To summarize: the command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a mandate not to judge either good or evil – simply to live and not to be the Judge – to let God be the Judge of all.
2. I recently spent 18 months studying and writing out of Mark’s Jesus-biography. The Jesus I kept finding was one who constantly blurred, erased, challenged, and dissolved lines between people, and between people and God. He brought unity instead of distinction. He held diversity (within and without) in a beautiful, messy, mysterious tension rather than giving in to the human temptation to disperse the tension with a neatly drawn line in the sand. He repeatedly did not give in to the human tendency to reduce everything to black-and-white thinking, good-and-bad assignments, or trite answers to complex problems. He avoided one-size-fits-all statements of orthodoxy (to affirm or deny intellectually) and instead offered individuals within their communities contextualized challenges to live more free and more loving lives.
3. Furthermore, how else might one read Paul in Galatians 3:28? Below is my experiment-inspired, contemporized paraphrase of Paul’s writing, relevant for his time, though a bit limited in ours (italics are Paul’s original):

 

Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek,

there is neither slave nor free,

there is no male and female,

there is neither fat nor thin,

there is neither healthy nor unhealthy,

there is neither dunce nor brilliant,

there is neither rich nor poor,

there is no deserving or undeserving,

there is no advantaged or disadvantaged,

there is neither special nor common,

there is neither homeless nor mansioned,

there is neither lazy nor workaholic,

there is neither liberal nor conservative,

there is neither churchgoing nor non-churchgoing,

there is neither Christian nor non-Christian,

there is neither vice nor virtue,

there is neither orthodox nor unorthodox,

there is neither addicted nor freed,

there is neither right-about-everything nor wrong-about-everything,

there is neither enlightened nor ignorant,

for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

 

I am not saying that no one is any of these things; I am just choosing not to be the Judge of who is or who isn’t these things. I am admitting that I don’t know who is what and that it doesn’t matter very much what I think anyway, since God is the Judge of all. I am choosing not to let it matter to me as much as it did in the past. I am choosing to let others swim freely alongside me in this vast ocean of Grace that is an extension of God to us.

This experiment has been really freeing. Scary at first: Who will draw the lines if not I? How will I justify myself if I erase all of the lines that I have always used to make myself feel secure and good? But then incredibly freeing. Freeing for myself and freeing for the people around me – whether or not they feel it, my heart is beginning to warm with love a bit more often than it freezes with judgment. And this experiment has left me with far less answers and far more questions. Beautiful, intoxicating, frightening questions like:

And since the actual Judge, this one Christ Jesus, loved humans with a love that cost him his very and entire life, what good is my judgment – except to create incessantly too-high expectations for myself and others in my heart?

And since the actual Judge, this one Christ Jesus, will one day receive all of the glory, fame, and honor from every human whose knee will bow and tongue will confess, what difference does my judgment make – except to ruin love and compassion toward myself and others in the here and now?

Aren’t we all just doing our best with what we’ve got? More or less? For better and for worse?

Isn’t God the One who is in charge of, responsible for, and orchestrating the life and growth of each one of us? Need I intrude?

What does it mean for us all if we are all just mostly, primarily, beautifully human – imago dei – unified in the One Man, Christ Jesus?

 

Try the experiment with me a bit; let me know how it goes.

 

{PS. I found this photo after I’d written the entire post. I loved the image of drawing “love” instead of lines in the sand.}