Judge Not

“Deliver us from presumption.” That’s the prayer I once scribbled onto a sticky note and posted directly above my computer monitor. It was a late-night “arrow prayer” inspired by the texts I’d been reading in seminary.

In the ensuing years I’ve come to appreciate this unadulterated wisdom prayer for what it is – simple and straightforward. I appreciate it so much because I find it so hard to live by. I’m shooting this little prayer quite a bit these days.

As life brought me into my thirties, I became increasingly aware of my need to judge, to categorize, to create little silos into which I could put people and ideas. It was and is a kind of shorthand – an excuse for not really getting to know people, which when you think about it is no way to live.

Stop for a moment and just consider: how many judgments and critiques do you make in the course of a day, or even an hour? A few might be based on sound principles of business or the need for survival, but I’ll bet the majority of them are useless to your everyday existence. Yet it is so easy to do whether it occurs at the coffee shop, the grocery store, the library, or even (and sometimes especially) the church community.

Presumption about others is a warm and protective blanket that keeps us in the right at all costs. It fuels hatred, misunderstanding, lack of conversation, and calcification in the righteousness of our own beliefs. It keeps the status quo and protects the majority view. It promotes a false happiness based on the uninformed lies we tell ourselves.

How boring. And dangerous.

Isn’t there some other way of living our lives? What if we didn’t have to hide behind the walls of our egos? What if we could become rooted in a real happiness – the kind that sees the world more like it actually is, and doesn’t depend on presumption, judgment, and mischaracterization?

There is a way, of course. It is to look and listen: to see and hear with all of one’s senses, and always at the deepest possible level. Become a watcher, a listener. Cultivate the habit. Work hard at it. Watch the world change in front of your eyes.

People will become more interesting to you. They won’t be as greedy or as dumb as you might have originally thought. Their true motives for acting in the world will become clearer, as will your own. You will find yourself more equipped to help and be a friend, less inclined to walk away from a potential relationship.

History’s greatest spiritual teachers have sounded in on the need for avoiding presumption and striving to see conditions and people as they are. Make the stretch to be there, and you’ll be in good company.

If “Deliver us from presumption” is the little arrow prayer, then the response is to exercise compassion. To borrow a phrase, compassion starts when we stop, look, and listen.

Have a good week.

The Rev. Torey Lightcap is Priest-In-Charge of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glenwood Springs.