8 - Judgment vs discernment

8 – Judgment vs Discernment

In the last post I talked about the unsolicited advice that I offered a friend and how it wasn’t helpful.

For me, this interaction is about something even deeper – it is about judgment, about deciding what is right or wrong. Or even as I discussed in a prior post – maybe deciding what is healthier vs less healthy. I believed the advice that I was offering to my friend was “healthy” and positive. But it wasn’t received that way. And why did I need to make my friend “healthier” anyway?

This is an active topic for me. One that I’m trying to work with. I don’t really think of myself as a judgmental person, but it apparently comes across to others. When discussing a book with a friend (a different one from the prior two), she commented that I was “being judgy” about it. That stung. I thought I was just offering my opinion, but I guess it came across as too harsh.

I think what I’m realizing now is the difference between judgment and discernment. We all have things that we like or don’t like, things that fit with us or don’t fit with us. That’s normal. We can’t all like broccoli or classical music. That is more discernment – I like X, but don’t like Y. There is no morality behind it. It is more of an observation.

I think what I’m discovering is that judgment can be something more freighted – it often comes with moral baggage – being right or wrong. There is sometimes condemnation if it is wrong, and praise if it is right.

It is not to say that I don’t have standards or things that I believe in. Or that I’m totally nihilistic or amoral. It is maybe that I’m becoming humbler about things. Maybe I don’t know the whole situation or maybe there are other explanations for why people make the choices that they do. In fact, with my friend, I didn’t know all the details and made an erroneous judgment. Or maybe I’m becoming more curious – why would someone act that way? What is in their background that would lead them to this decision? But being curious without that weight of self-righteousness or condemnation.

This has been such a deep issue for a long time. I know where this sense of morality in judgment comes from – my deeply Catholic upbringing. As I do more mindfulness and practice more meditation, I am getting better about discernment, about being the observer, about feeling something without making a judgment about it. But judgment is my default. And that is coupled with the sense of then trying to fix something, to make something “right” that was “wrong.”

It is also intimately linked with Forgiveness and Acceptance. Those are huge topics and something that I will definitely be addressing in the future. In the meantime, I will try to unpack the judgment a bit more.

This will be a short post. I don’t have much to say about it other than it is an active area for me, and one that I’m trying to work through. The best way to work through it maybe is to go back to the start of where this came from – growing up as a devout Roman Catholic. Part of coming though the other side of judgment is realizing that the world is more nuanced. Like my brother was trying to tell me all those years ago when I was 12, the world is not simply “Right and Wrong” but that there are multiple shades of gray. Seeing gray instead of black and white is about discernment. I’m still struggling with seeing things that way but getting better at it.

Note:

The next several posts will be about my childhood, including the key role that the Roman Catholic Church played in my upbringing. Going forward, “Church” with a capital “C” refers to the Roman Catholic Church in general; “church” with a small “c” refers to the building where we attended Mass.

I want to set the stage for how I grew up. The first post will be about where I grew up. The next post will be about when I grew up, in the wake of the reforms of Vatican II. The subsequent posts will discuss how Catholicism was woven into the fabric of my life and how I eventually left the Church that loved so much as a child.

Up Next: “Growing up Catholic: The Where – It Takes a Village”