Something happened last November. Something big. The lead up to it happened while we were asleep: we were judged as a nation. I don’t mean the kind that brings up images of apocalyptic hellfire and brimstone—though these were featured in many of my patients’ dreams. No, I mean something much more disturbing: the judgment of our current relational dynamics as a people. (Leave it to a therapist to be worried about that!) We really are not nice to each other. At all. And clearly, up to today, not much has changed. So on that day, what was hidden, lurking in the shadows, was made plain sight for the world to see. Because on that day we validated the worst in us and about us.
It turns out that none of us is living in the America we think we are living in. I don’t care how you identify yourself politically, or even for whom you voted: the storm came, and we all found out on what kind of foundation we had been building the latest iteration of America. That foundation is more sand, than rock. Shifty. Hollow. Like Donald Trump.
“We are all under judgment”, writes Thomas Merton (1968) in Faith and Violence.
Doh!
Wait what? No, THEY-THOSE PEOPLE over there might be under "judgment". THEY are so clearly on the wrong side of history. THEY truly are against all things holy. THOSE PEOPLE are deplorable. Not me. I’m at least… aware.
Merton, having been one who was engaged with ingenious assertive humility with what is, writes these unsettling words, not from a religious stance that seeks to avoid the reality of his (and our) present moment by diverting our attention to some disembodied theological eschatology known as “the Final Judgment”: “yes, yes, Tommy Boy. We all will be judged on that final day: some of us believe that.” Rather, Merton is speaking directly to those in his present moment in history--now--who use the consumption of media with issues of “equality, justice, and liberty for all” say, somewhat sneakily. Indeed, he acutely notices that being up to date with the latest news (feed) can be an effective way to avoid facing our own selves in the lonely solitude of doing business, as on a desert island, with our own conscience. Sneaky, sneaky: we can seem to be engaged with the necessary movements of Resistance demanded by our moment in time, but without doing the internal work our moment in time calls for. Who among us has shut it all down, gone to a secret place, and faced the magnitude of our shame, guilt, fears and all the rest (both as a collective and as an individual) for ways we have participated in acts of “inequality, injustice and imprisonment for all” say? This moment did not arrive out of thin air, as Dave Chapelle and the SNL cast so keenly played out on the show that aired on November 12th.
It’s all fun and games until someone like Donald Trump gets elected to the presidency of the United States. The title of another of Thomas Merton’s books, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, says it all about himself and his own turning point. Up until his famed moment in Louisville on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, he had been contented to be, shall we say, "of the world but not in it".
In his essay “Events and Pseudo-Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman” in which this judgment quote is found, Merton is speaking specifically to white religious folk engaged in the movements of resistance, advocacy, and protest so central to the 1960's. These religious folk (for once!) were on the right side of history. In that vein, they urge him to write one more thoughtful prophetic pronouncement about civil rights, Vietnam, race relations, the nuclear age, and/or ecumenism. But he simply says no. He has already said what he needs to say. Merton states unequivocally that he is concerned with actual communication, not the intoxication of novelty repackaged ad nauseum. And that's to what he would be contributing if he were to write yet another piece-- and he wants no part in it. But then he goes on to write a cunning essay on Real news-worthy events, versus what we might call today, Reality TV. I highly recommend the read. You will find a lot of resonance with our current state of affairs.
One thing he writes is, that no matter how we identify (liberal/conservative, spiritually, ethnically, racially, sexually, whatever--you name it) that “we are all under judgment.” Therefore, in times like these where divisiveness, suspicion and fear reign in every corner of the nation (and globe), we each need to first and foremost spend time in utter solitude with our conscience. We need to face ourselves, alone. “Our real choice,” writes Merton, “is between being like Job who knew he was stricken, and Job’s friends who did not know that they were stricken too— though less obviously than he. (So they had answers!)” He does not want to be the one with "answers" because, in the case of Job's friends, those answers had nothing to do with the real problem. (Although they offer great examples of how not to be with someone in suffering!) "If we know that we are all under judgment," Merton continues, "we will cease to make the obvious wickedness of “the others” a fulcrum for our own supposed righteousness to exert itself upon the world” (p. 145-146).
Bam!
Do we know that we are all equally stricken? Do we see ourselves in the foreign other, the person we are so convinced we are not? (Oh, we're in there. Let's not be fooling ourselves.) Or are we intoxicating ourselves, getting drunk on the endless barrage of adrenaline filled reactivity driven by, let’s face it, a capitalist media that just wants our consumption. Image is everything. They don't care about you. They only try to make you feel that way. The current frenzy only bears witness to a culture of endless distraction and noise in which we are all embedded, which so easily plays on the terror we all have of facing our own real selves. “Yeah, I participated, but at least I am not like THEM!” we might secretly think. Or “Keep moving… nothing to see here. I’m off to reify my beliefs all the more!!!” I tell you what: let’s keep reacting. Let’s keep posting protest and outrage on social media. Let’s keep avoiding our deep selves. Exhibit A: our President.
Zing!
I am not knocking protest or posting on social media, nor the kinds of national conversations which are now possible through the media. These are essential to growing our consciousness as a person and as a nation. And is this not a blog entry delivered to your “door” through social media?? Ha! But if we, you and I, have not fully taken in the events of November 8th in the quiet solitude and sobering that this day forces upon us all, again no matter which side of the aisle we tend towards, then we are most likely still intoxicated by the systems which got us into this mess in the first place. In short, if you have not been deeply grieved and silenced at a core level by the state of our relationships with the “other” in this country, I have 3 action steps you can take: 1. Stop. 2. Shut up. 3. Listen. The more extended version of this is (excusing my French bien sur): “1. Stop what you are doing. 2. Shut the fuck up. And 3. Listen to what truly is the state of our affairs.” (Hint: not good.)
I do believe that those 3 words are a loose translation of Jesus’ words to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. 1. Stop what you are doing! 2. Shut the fuck up. And 3. Listen to what truly is.” See Paul was in his own bubble. He was sure. In fact, he was the poster child of faithfulness to his God. He was holding on to the one true heritage of his people, and fighting for it. By his impeccable study of Scripture, he was clear on who was in and who was out. And he was willing to stone people to death if they did not subscribe to his “biblical” reading of the Scriptures. “In the name of ridding our chosen land of all untruth, I will kill you” is the motto he lived out in no uncertain terms. He clearly had not yet been sobered. He was intoxicated with his truth— his bubble—as if it was The Truth.
But then something happened that knocked him off his high horse (is that where that expression comes from? Inquiring minds want to know). Indeed, someone outside any category he had constructed for himself showed up. A stranger appeared to him, and said, “Stop what you are doing! Shut the fuck up. And listen to what is!” (Okay, fine—not in so many words.) Have you ever been stopped in the tracks of your own "certainty", of your own assumptions you hold so dear? The ones that keep you warm at night? I have. If yes, you know that it’s something like my loose translation that Paul heard. And, if yes, you also probably know what he was feeling in that very moment too. Scared. Stunned. Speechless. Blank. He was in the dark, blinded. In his case, literally. He was disoriented, not knowing what way was up or down anymore. He was silenced. He was grieved. He was humbled. The universe had suddenly become nothing of what he thought it was. Perhaps this is why we are terrified of the stranger in our midst. We might come to know the real truth about ourselves. Yup, judgment is destabilizing. Judgment is silencing. Judgment, in the end, is an apocalypse (lit. trans. a revelation— not brimstone & fire). It reveals what has always been there, but we had been avoiding. Judgment is humbling beyond compare, but ultimately judgment is relieving.
And it’s hot. Searing hot. (Okay, maybe judgment has a little bit of fire connoted with it.)
I know, it doesn’t sound fun. But when it comes and you figure out how to make use of it, it turns out to be the very thing that liberates you to love “more better”. Like the Grinch, your heart grows at least "3 sizes that day." Yup, more better and more freely too. Because God’s judgment (in whatever form it takes, whether as a real estate buffoon, or a young Jewish rabbi from Galilee) ends up always being good news.
It’s hot, sure. But we become gold in the end. Real gold. Not pseudo-gold in a pseudo-reality—like Trump Tower.
See human judgment (you know the junior high kind which so marked us all, okay only me… fine) is pseudo-judgment. It’s a shadow of the real thing, because it is always rooted in fear. Always. I judge you because I am afraid of whatever dis-ease you have—you have cooties, and you are contagious. Yuck! Filth! Or, I judge you because I am actually afraid that (pseudo)-self that I present to the world will be found out to be just that: pseudo. A cover. A seeming me vs. a real me. I will be exposed. I would be found out to be sand, and not rock. That would suck, so in my fear I will judge you to make sure I’m never exposed. In fact, I might even bully you. In other words, I judge you for your (filthy-diseased-not-me) strange otherness by keeping you quarantined over there (in neighborhoods, faiths, career statuses, nations, academia, access to health care, etc…) and I will erect belief systems to keep it that way. If I do not, your strange otherness will be sure to tarnish my purity, my status, my way of life, and my holiness. Not to mention, it will mess with my desired states of obliviousness--it’s so peaceful there.
There are so many ways we come up with to rid ourselves of the feared other. And yet, it is the stranger— the other— who paradoxically frees us from the hell in which we didn't even know we were living. Ask St. Paul.
Whereas human judgment is pseudo-judgment, God’s judgment is what it’s all about. It turns out, God’s a real trickster. Sneakier than we are with ourselves. The joke’s on us. Why? Because the thing we fear most ends up being the instrument of our freedom. Indeed, God doesn’t do junior high judgment, because God’s judgment is not rooted in fear. It is rooted in love. God’s “holiness”, “status”, or “purity” is not afraid of getting dirty from our filth (whether real or imagined). At all. Not afraid even one bit. Nada. God’s judgment actually makes us whole, as God embraces us in our fear and filth with arms of love. Ha! God is not afraid of his holiness getting tarnished. Whoever told you that he is? (Okay, don’t answer that.) God can stand us, all of us, every part of us. God can more than stand us. God loves us. God gets messy with our very humanity. No obliviousness there. Exhibit B: the cross.
And in that judging embrace, God breathes new life into us. We play more, with a new freedom to love the other more, not less. We can actually relax, because at the deepest level, quite mysteriously, our lives are no longer felt to be at stake. We have room for the stranger in our midst, without fear. In fact, we might even look forward to what the stranger will add to our lives, how we will grow and change in beautiful ways because of them. We begin to experience kinship. Because we are all in this together. We all (and I mean ALL people) stand equally on and in Love as the ground of our being. In the words of St. Paul, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”
And what did Paul do once he fell off his horse? He first spent time in solitude with his conscience. And then, low and behold, he went on to build bridges between Jews and Gentiles, as if he had come to believe that each people’s previously isolated destinies were bound up in each other's. Go figure. Exhibit C: Paul.
I believe our nation is waking up to the work we have to do to become the people America’s promise calls us to be. I’m probably mostly speaking to my fellow white people. Come on my fellow white people: enough is enough. Non-whites are well aware of how much we fall short of this calling day and after day. And on a day like today, as the White Nationalists are crowding the streets of Charlottesville, VA, it is we white people who need to step up and dare to not be guilty bystanders anymore. For that is most often who we have been. But maybe I’m speaking to parts of all us, no matter what kind of American we identify as. I leave that up to you and your conscience.
Either way, it turns out that weaving together the destinies of immigrants from all over the globe into one great common tapestry with “equality, justice, and liberty for all” is very hard, very hard… especially in a land that has known both genocide and slavery, and whose people are immersed in the systems that have been erected in and through these. And some are invested, including financially, in making sure these systems stay that way.
So what of this time in our history? Do we dare suffer God’s judgLOVEment? If yes, all we have to do is stop. Shut up. And listen.
Love will find us if we do. Exhibit D: America?