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 Beyond Judgment By Clarissa Worley Sproul
My friend had suffered early in life. She had been very angry and bitter as a child. Her mother had divorced her father and taken up with another man. She hadn’t been the nicest mom to begin with, but when she left, she became this evil traitor. Daily her father would nurture the seeds of judgment against her mother, parading her failures and making her out to be this conniving woman who wielded her power to destroy their lives. My friend had swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Now as we talked, she mused how bitterness had grown up inside and broken up her own marriage. Not only had she chosen a man who loved to play the victim like her dad had, she had also become much of the person she had judged all those years. She was now the woman in the story and all that she feared she created. Their marriage was filled with tension and frustration. Having been raised a Christian she had always seen her mother as far from the fold, and people who divorced as bad and mean. The crushing weight of all her judgments almost suffocated her as her own marriage started to fall apart. She cried and she tried and she refused to admit that things were getting worse. Looking into the face of her own two little boys, she feared all the hatred and judgment that would now be heaped on her. Drowning in guilt and shame she found herself a divorced woman. Suddenly all those telling stares she’d given to others were focused on her. Suddenly all of her flippant assumptions of people who were divorced cut into her own heart. Here she was, the very epitome of what she had deemed the dredges of society. She was now her mother, the selfish public failure. These were her thoughts, and as harsh as they sounded, they paled in comparison to the severity of the feelings that accompanied them. What most impacted me from our conversation was the healing that had come from the brokenness of failure. It was like she had been perched so high on the ledge of her hardened and judgmental heart, that when she fell off of it, everything shattered completely, giving her a chance at feeling and thinking in reality again. No more vilifying her mother, she had felt and seen and knew the complexity of a shattered union. Her mother had been no less human than she, no matter how devastating her actions had been. What happens when we are judged for what we have judged is incredible. First, we see how shallow our thinking was. We see how we looked on at the world like it was black and white and every person a stick figure. Second, we face the crushing wave our own judgments as they come flying right out of our own heads. We taste and see the pain and trauma we once caused people just like ourselves. And finally, we get a clear picture at how ridiculously arrogant we have been. My friend helped me understand this. She had looked down at her mother and everyone else who failed to stay married. She had known for all her life, she would never subject her two little boys to such tyranny and confusion. No, she would give her children what she had never had, an unbroken home. All those high and determined thoughts were the framework of her inability to be humble and real and vulnerable with her husband, and admit things were bad and they needed help, thus causing the very thing she abhorred. As I thought over our conversation later, I mused how these were the very thoughts that had made her blind enough to marry a man who was as arrogant as she was. Both of them had found their early identities shaped by blame and judgment. Both had coddled the kind of victim-hood that grows out of judging, to the point where they were almost incapable of accepting fault for much at all. Ironically, the similarity of their coping mechanisms that probably drew them together would be the very traits that would spin them apart. Not only did judgment make discerning the character of her former husband improbable, it made seeing herself impossible. This bled into every aspect of her life. Judgment is the most blinding of habits. The more we have judged others, the less capable we are of seeing our own weirdities. Most people I meet, myself included, have very little to say for their own shortcomings. We seem to hobble around with wobbly legs and then with the crutch of judgment deem ourselves as nimble and quick, even athletic. Well what was in many ways a huge disaster, the divorce, really did usher in some deep healing and saving. My friend is not at all the person she once was. She is not a victim anymore, nor is she self-sufficient. She sees the pain and frustration that drove her mother away in the first place. She’s looked in the history of things and finds more in common with her parents than you’d expect. The faux is gone and the real is in. What a relief. Visit Life Notes ______________________________ Clarissa Worley Sproul writes from the Pacific Northwest. All rights reserved © 2010 AnswersForMe.org. Click here for content usage information. Add your comment. |
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