The novice director at another of our monasteries carries a card in the pocket of his robe with these words printed on them. He takes it out from time to time, to recall them for himself or to share with someone else. They are lines from a letter by St. Charles de Foucauld:
From the moment in which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify the person with what we know of him and so reduce him to that, we cease to love the person and he ceases to be able to become better. We should expect everything of everyone. We must dare to be love in a world that does not know how to love.
He relates judging others to not confiding in them, not trusting; and in particular not trusting what remains unknown in the other. We might ask: how can we trust what we don’t know?
But a better question is, how can we trust what we do know? if we knew it we wouldn’t need to trust… At times, what we know, what we’ve seen of the other person may not seem very trustworthy. But that doesn’t define or exhaust who they are.
We believe in faith that every person is made in the image of God, with the potential to be united with him. However thwarted or disfigured, each person is a unique manifestation of divine creativity, a person with infinite value.
We must not reduce them to our own observations and diagnoses, however perceptive we might imagine these to be, however conveniently they reinforce our favorite storylines… It’s not that we don’t form ideas about people but that we’re aware of these prejudices and don’t let ourselves grow attached to them. We are ready and willing to be surprised.
When we judge others we fail to love, and as St Charles puts it, strikingly, the other person “ceases to be able to become better.” By withholding respect and trust, by pigeonholing others, we actually inhibit their growth. If that seems hard to believe consider the reverse and how much a person can thrive and grow in a loving and supportive environment.
If we love others as we love ourselves then we need to get free of stale and limiting judgments about ourselves as well. Since, as we read in Sirach, “If you’re stingy with yourself, to whom will you be generous?”
There’s a Buddhist teacher who would go to meet his students each morning fully expecting that they had attained complete awakening overnight. He came into their presence as he would that of a Buddha.
Surely we too can hope that grace might have touched the person we find so hard to take? Are we willing to be surprised?