Day 59
3 The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world’s learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible. This is not an opinion but a fact. In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivably wide range of things; past, present and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception, so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who except in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?
This paragraph was the reason I became willing to stop judging. Once Jesus pointed out to me the reason it is impossible for me judge anything rightly, I realized I have no business judging. The ego, of course, wants to make exceptions. I judged my son being very sick as bad, but I came to understand that I was wrong to make that judgment.
How do I know what his karma needs in order to be discharged? How do I know what effects that sickness had on other people in his life, and how it might affect him later in his life? I certainly received many lessons from my experience with it, and other people I know have been affected, including people who have read about it through my writing.
I will sometimes see some of the effects of some of the things I am tempted to judge as bad, and understand how that judgment would be wrong, but often I don’t understand. My mother died of Alzheimer’s disease at this time two years ago. I don’t understand how that disease could be anything but bad. I don’t see any good that came from it. I can only trust that Jesus is right that I don’t have enough information to make a judgment.
I visualize the Atonement as an immense tapestry with millions of threads interweaving to create a picture of perfect wholeness. If I am looking at one very minute part of the tapestry it looks like a little scene within the whole. I can only see what is going on in that very isolated small section of the tapestry and cannot see what happens to the threads after, and which threads go on to weave in and out with other threads to complete the part I may never be aware of, and how some of those threads will go on to create other isolated scenes.
Seen from a single person’s perspective the tapestry seems to be many separate and isolated stories, but from a distance they resolve into one picture of all that is. Does Myron imagine she can direct this weaving, these stories? How can I say what should be happening or not happening?
The whole thing is so complex and so far outside the narrow scope of my vision that I cannot begin to direct the weave. I cannot even understand what my very small part is to look like, much less how it adds to the finished tapestry.
I am grateful that it is not my job to make these decisions. It seems that Jesus is in charge of the Atonement because he sees the entire project and knows what the final picture will be. I am not learning to refrain from judgment because I am not allowed, but because I cannot. When you consider the folly of judging, the attempt to do so is clearly the ego at its most grandiose.
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