Teachings by the Early Church on Judgmentalism
In past blogs, I’ve been discussing the early Egyptian monastics and their spiritual wisdom that can be such a help to us modern-day Christians. Dr. Roberta Bondi reminds us that the Egyptian monastics called obsessive thoughts, habits, or emotions that blind us so that we cannot love “passions." The passions are not sins, but they can lead to sins, if we act on them. Basically, they are wounds within us that can destroy our lives and the lives of others around us. The monastics strongly believed it is our job “to fight against the passions and to seek healing with the help of God and each other in order to be able to love as we were made to love.”
One of the worst passions is a judgmental attitude. Any progress in our lives depends upon our taking responsibility for ourselves before God, and then working with God's grace and healing. We must also take responsibility for ourselves before others. Fundamental to loving our neighbors is learning to see our faults, admit them to one another, and apologize. Yet, this can seem nearly impossible for many of us, because admitting a mistake can feel like a loss of self and self-esteem. So we can become defensive and act self-righteously. We can try to build our self-esteem by judging others. God frees us from this burden, however, when we begin to realize the truth that our worth comes, not from what we do, nor from what others think of us, but from the identity God gives us as God's own beloved child.
Judgmentalism is the opposite of that realization - that our identity is as God's beloved child. Judgmentalism was such a great concern of the early monastics, and remains such a hurtful attitude today that we will spend more than one blog examining it. The early monastics were concerned with the many ways we can define our own goodness and identities at the expense and exclusion of others. When acted upon, "judgmentalism destroys community," Bondi says; "it destroys those who do the judging, and, even more seriously for the monastic teachers, it often destroys (and certainly excludes from community) the one who is judged. On a small scale, judgmentalism destroys marriages, families, and churches. It provides the major fuel of racism, sexism, neglect of the poor, and national self-righteousness on a wider scale. Judgmentalism for this reason as a breach of love is as serious as any other sin we might commit against one another. Thus Abba Theodore warns us always to remember that "the one who told us not to commit various other sins also said, 'Do not judge.'"
Blessings,
Pastor Betsy
Betsy.Caudill@LongsChapel.com
Sources:
Roberta C. Bondi, To Pray & to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 37-38.
Ibid, pp. 108-109.
