No Bible quote I post on social media engenders as much pushback as Jesus’ simple phrase, “Judge not” (or “Do not judge,” depending on the translation of Matthew 7:1).
The immediate responses are almost always the same: “Father, of course we must judge! How can you not judge another person’s actions?” Or “Father, surely you don’t mean that Jesus asks us not to decide which actions are right and wrong!” Or “You’re taking that out of context!” Or, just as often, “Typical Jesuit baloney!”
It’s hard for us not to judge. And while it’s natural (and part of our moral maturation) that we would see some actions as right or wrong, judging the person is up to God. Jesus is pretty clear about that, several times in fact.
As Isaac Slater, O.C.S.O., a Trappist monk, poet and author, notes, the urge to judge seems almost ingrained in us. Father Isaac, a monk of the Abbey of the Genesee in upstate New York, serves as both novice director (in the Jesuits, we call this the most important job in the entire Province) and the “infirmarian,” the monk who cares for the sick and elderly monks in the monastery’s infirmary. Among his many other accomplishments, Father Isaac was awarded America’s Foley Poetry prize, our highest honor for a poet, in 2007.
Judging is hard to avoid. And good Christians often judge themselves for judging. “I’m being too judgmental,” we might say to ourselves. Further, we’re tempted to think, “Well, if I were a holy monk or cloistered nun, I wouldn’t have that problem!”
Think again, says Father Isaac. The most challenging aspect of monastic life is not the early morning hours for prayer or the simple food, he says, but something else: the other monks. “Not being able to escape from somebody who really triggers you, gets under your skin. And he’s always there…. You have to figure out or find a way to live alongside this person that you find so troubling.”
Thomas Merton, another Trappist, once wrote that the “first and most elemental” test of anyone’s vocation to the religious life is the realization that everyone in the religious community, whether Trappist, Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit or otherwise, is “more or less imperfect.” That insight has been a great help to my own vocation and my own efforts to accept my brother Jesuits as they are, not as I would like them to be. It also involves trusting that they accept me, with all my faults and limitations and sins. As my novice director said when I mentioned that one of my brother novices drove me crazy, “Well, I bet you drive him crazy, too!”
Father Isaac notes that many of our judgments stem from fictional constructs that we create in our own heads. “The accuser and the accused are both fictions, and we tend to give them too much reality,” he said. In other words, we see ourselves as perfect and therefore free of the need to be judged, and the other person as imperfect and therefore the natural object of judging. It’s Jesus’ parable about the splinter in the other person’s eye and the log in your own (Mt 7:3-5). So much of having a nonjudgmental stance rests on recognizing your own log first. Reality is quite the tonic.
Father Isaac put it more succinctly, “The need is to really inhabit our brokenness a hundred percent in all its different facets…. Only if we do that can we really be entirely available and non-judging toward others.”
Our conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” though, was not simply about how not to judge but about many other aspects of the spiritual life, like the value of silence, which can confuse some people. Why do you need to be silent to let God speak? Can’t God speak in the activity of your daily life?
Yes, God can. But silence offers God a different way, or rather a different setting, for speaking to you. It’s obviously an important part of cloistered life. “The deeper you go into the quiet, the more the other aspects of the monastic life really start to resonate,” Father Isaac explains.
But silence can be an important part of all our lives, whether we’re a young mother or father with a squalling newborn or the novice director in a monastery. And we talk about how to find or incorporate silence even into a busy and physically noisy life.
I very much enjoyed speaking with Father Isaac. The Trappists have been a huge part of my own spiritual life, not only because of the writings of Thomas Merton, but thanks to friendships with Trappist monks and visits and retreats at the Trappist monasteries at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown, Ky., and St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Mass. If you’ve never have a chance to visit a Trappist monastery, you can imbibe a great deal of their quiet, gentle, open, nonjudgmental spirituality from our conversation with Father Isaac.
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