This weekend I found myself in judgment. Harsh and severe, self-righteously spewing and zapping, quite eloquently, I was told, and with such certainty of my accurate discernment. I judged on a subject on which I have judged so many times before; and have tried so many times to stop judging. Yet, I did it again and I suspect it will happen again more than once before I finally understand, in a real, integrated way, that I really, truly am to abandon judgment. That the speck in my neighbor's eye is not mine to remove, the log in my own eye however, is.
I went to see my friend, well he's more than a friend and that is when my judging gets really sticky. He was drunk. It was not even 6 o'clock but he had been drinking with friends much of the day. His breath was stinging my eyes and his beautiful blue eyes were swimming. He didn't want me to leave, I wanted to run. He wanted to talk about it. So we did -- and that is possibly when leaving would have been preferable because that is when the judging began. I started out staying beautifully in my own business. Just making it clear that alcohol is something I stay away from completely because it shuts down my ability to hear my own Spirit guide me, and I don't want to be around intoxicated people because I find them unable to connect with me in any real way. That he is free to drink, and I am free to leave. That's ok, right. I get to not be around drunk people.
But it didn't stop there of course. I have so many feelings about alcohol and over and over, as I tried to remember who was in front of me, I had this nauseating deja vu, and I didn't see my friend, I saw my dad. Really, like I was momentarily hallucinating; or he was shape shifting. I was in some time warp and there I was, a little girl, sitting in my father's lap, in his library, the sweet, oddly comforting smell of scotch on his breath. Their eyes are so similar, the blue, swimming eyes that look at me with so much love and lostness at the same time. Wanting so much to connect and reach me, yet being unreachable themselves behind this foggy veil.
I refocused on the handsome man in front of me, the man I am just getting to know but who feels like I have known him for a thousand years - and on and on I lectured, about the devastation that alcohol brings to families, how it breaks people apart, disconnects them, undermines their Spirit's efforts to manifest more fully in our bodies, how I can't live with it, how alcohol damages your organs, your liver in particular and how the eye infections that won't heal, yes, those are all because of alcohol.
Today, I feel oddly hungover myself. As if this judging binge was not so different from that of a raging alcoholic's. Confucious said, "A gentleman calls attention to the good points of others; he does not call attention to their defects. The small man does just the reverse of this." By that standard, I am small. Yesterday, I let my ego rule and judge and I closed my heart to protect it while I was doing it. Yet, we somehow got through it. I didn't run away, I stayed. I listened and I judged and today I judge myself for judging -- and tomorrow I will forgive myself for judging myself and others.
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
Matthew 7.1-5