Who are we Listening to? Thots on knowing and judging

This post is a bit of a potpourri of thoughts from several sources, that I've been trying to integrate in my mind.

First a quote from Esther Meek in Longing to Know:

Humans fight to make sense of their experience! How many times in our day and in our lives do we do this! Your roommate is acting uncharacteristically; you immediately begin to search for an explanation. Or your roses are failing to bloom. Or you take a new class in a new subject with a new professor, and you find yourself immersed in terminology about as transparent as so many pieces of granite. You fight to make sense of what he or she is saying. Or your parents divorce, and you ask yourself desparately, What happened? What does this say about me? What does it say about them? What does it say about God? Trying to make sense of experiences is somewhat of a compulsion for humans.

The act of knowing is all about making sense of a whole collection of clues and data, integrating them, and then relying on the discovery and acting on it.

One major source of difficulty, it seems to me, is that we are often too impatient to sort through all the possible explanations for the data and clues available, and so settle upon the explanation that comes most quickly to mind. You might say we tend to rush to judgement when we ought to suspend judgement until more clues and more data are available.

Quick judgements are necessary in some cases — driving in traffic for example — and morally neutral in others. But quick judgements about the character or motives of other persons are usually not morally neutral, as they then form the framework through which we subsequently relate to those persons, for good or for ill.

And neither are the explanations that spring most readily to mind typically neutral. That's one of the major points that Kyriacos Markides learns in his extended discussions with Father Maximos in The Mountain of Silence. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge go even further in The Sacred Romance and suggest that the explanations of many things, particularly painful experiences, that are most quickly suggested to our mind are deliberately chosen and expertly tailored to our pain by the Adversary in order to be easily accepted by us; and once so accepted, to get us to doubt the goodness of God.

So it becomes very important that in our search for meaning and sense that we consider carefully the ideas and explanations that present themselves to us, attempting to discern who is speaking — that we learn to distinguish the various voices that speak into our minds constantly throughout our waking moments. That, of course, can take a lifetime of spiritual discipline and development.

In the meantime, what do we do? The old puritans had an answer: render to each the "judgement of charity". That is, deliberately seek out the alternate explanations for another's behaviour, and choose that explanation which casts the other the best possible light consistent with the facts. This is, it is suggested, what Paul may have had in mind when he says that "Love believes all things" — not that love is naive, but that love deliberately chooses to believe the best about the other, consistent with the facts.

I've seen in my own experience that the first explanation for someone's behaviour or comment — particularly a blog comment — is often much more critical of the other's character or motivation that is necessary. With considered thought, one can generally come up with several more charitable explanations. And with continued adherence to this discipline over time, the initial reactions tend to become more charitable than they once were.

What is particularly regretable, however, is how often we see the rule of offering the judgement of charity violated in Christian circles. So much so that instead of seeing Christians as a people whose default mode of operation is the judgement of charity, the world's accepted stereotype of Christians, particularly of evangelical Christians, is that of a people whose default mode of operation is precisely the opposite — the judgement of condemnation. The shame is that the stereotype is not entirely inaccurate.

God have mercy upon us, sinners!