"Judge Not"-Dont' Worry. He Didn't Really Mean It

Walking the Labyrinth—September 18, 2009—St Zosimas was an old man who lived in the badlands of Cilicia (south-eastern Turkey) about 1700 years ago. A medieval chronicle tells us “he lived a hermit’s life, a friend to the beasts and wild animals in that barren region.” Zosimas left the big city of Tarsus (St Paul’s hometown), his biographer says, “preferring the wilderness and a life of prayer and solitude to the entrapments of the city.” One day a hunting party rode up to Zosimas’ cottage and stopped to refresh themselves by his well. While they watered their mounts, the hunters asked why the old man lived so far from civilization. “I am a Christian,” he answered, “and seek a quiet life. The Emperor’s persecution of Christians makes that difficult. I fled here, where, with the animals as my only companions, I seek God in peace.” Imagine Zosimas’ surprise to learn the Emperor Diocletian, who had instigated the latest anti-Christian laws, was his questioner. The emperor told the hermit to renounce his faith and he would be left in peace, but Zosimas refused (if he’d agreed, of course, neither his name nor his story would have come down to us). Zosimas was beaten but held firm to his belief. The medieval chronicle tells of a friendly lion who came to Zosimas’ rescue and frightened the emperor and his party away, but if it’s true, it was too little, too late. Zosimas died of his wounds. His feast day is today, on Christian calendars worldwide. Two hundred years before the Emperor Diocletian rode up to Zosimas’ hermitage, another Roman emperor, Domitian, was assassinated on this date. Domitian, whose favorite pastime was killing flies in the imperial palace (according to the Roman historian Suetonius), was so loathed by all who knew him that even his wife joined the conspiracy. He was stabbed to death in his bedroom by a diverse group of household servants, soldiers on the palace staff and petty politicians. For several hours, while Domitian’s body lay on the bedroom floor, a succession of prominent Roman politicians made their way there and kicked or otherwise abused the corpse, proving the raw courage of politicians hasn’t changed in 2,000 years. On September 18, 1714, Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig und Lüneburg, Prince-Elector of Hanover, disembarked at Greenwich, England. Two days later this German nobleman was crowned “George I, King of Great Britain, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc,” at Westminster Abbey. Though fluent in German and French, with a passing knowledge of Latin, Italian and Dutch, George spoke no English. Members of the current House of Windsor are his descendants (the family changed their name at the height of anti-German feeling during World War I). On the same date, 63 years after German George set foot in Greenwich, British troops loyal to his grandson, George III, were poised outside Philadelphia, the seat of the American Continental Congress then in rebellion. They had defeated and outflanked General Washington’s shrinking army and the city lay open before them. On the night of September 18, 1777, while Congressional delegates and the well-to-do fled the city, the Liberty Bell was wrapped in sacking coated with hay and manure and placed into the wagon of militia private John Jacob Mickley. Taking back roads and cutting across private property, Mickley and his companions drove the bell to Allentown, 60 miles outside Philadelphia. At Zion Reformed Church, with the help of the pastor, they pulled up the floorboards and hid the bell. Nine months later, when the British left Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was returned, all cleaned up, to the city. Charles Lewis Tiffany and Teddy Young opened the doors of a “stationery and fancy goods emporium" in the lower floor of a private residence on Broadway in New York City on this day in 1837. When Young left the company in 1853, it simply became known as “Tiffany’s.” From the start the shop carried unusual items: Chinese goods, Japanese paper mache, terra cotta ware, umbrellas, fans, fine stationery and pottery. In 1843, Young traveled through Europe on a purchasing tour and acquired a large amount of “false diamond jewelry.” It proved popular and sold well, but many customers regretted the shop had no genuine diamonds to offer. Tiffany remembered. He made a tour of Europe a few years later, during the French Revolution of 1848, and found many aristocrats anxious to exchange heirloom jewels for quick cash. Tiffany invested all the company funds in the gems he was offered and returned to the United States with Marie Antoinette's bejeweled girdle and a chest full of other pieces that once belonged to the French crown. He encouraged the press in their frenzied coverage of an unveiling of his new treasures and New York papers dubbed Tiffany the “King of Diamonds." “Tiffany Studios” founded by Charles’ son Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1885, had no association with his father’s firm. The first issue of The New York Times made its appearance on September 18, 1851. The newspaper was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond, the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a banker, George Jones. It was initially called the New-York Daily Times and sold for one cent a copy. Today it sells for $1.50 and has a circulation of just over 1,000,000 copies daily, trailing only USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. You can find old issues of the NYT for sale online: for $10.00 you can buy a 1969 copy of the paper about the first lunar landing (as if it really happened, Melissa!), $20.00 buys a paper announcing President Obama’s election, $30.00 will get you a copy of the paper the day after the September 11, 2001 attack, $40.00 will buy you a copy of the “Gray Lady” with the headline “Nixon Resigns,” for $45.00 you can purchase a copy of the Times printed after the Assassination of President John F Kennedy, $50.00 will buy you a copy of the paper on the day Nazi Germany surrendered. And for $85.00 you can get a copy, still fresh, of the New York Times for Thursday, June 25, 2009 “Michael Jackson Dies at 50.” On this day in 1905, two birthdays: Émilie Claudette Chauchoin was born in Paris. Hundreds of miles away, in Stockholm, Louisa Gustafsson was born. Both would later move to California and change their names— Émilie Chauchoin to Claudette Colbert and Louisa Gustafsson to Greta Garbo. Today is the 261st day of the year, 104 days remain till 2010. On the calendar of the ancient Romans today is reckoned ante diem XIV Kalendas October, the closing day of the Ludi Romani. On this day in 1952, the most popular song in America was “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” by Hank Williams. On September 18, 1981, France officially discontinued the use of the guillotine. Once again, leading our country with resolve and daring, the United States Congress has declared today both National Play-Doh Day and National Chocolate Day: take your choice.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE an Old Style Anti-federalist like me to be unsurprised at the continuing deterioration of the Republic. I thought the nadir of our times had come during the inept presidency of George Bush, but now those days seem almost halcyon. Invective poisons our national discourse everywhere from politics to sports to faith—even education, a topic once uncontroversial, simmers and snaps with turmoil. During the last presidential campaign, candidate Obama said we need to learn how to “disagree without being disagreeable,” but the pronouncements from the White House show little desire to lower the temperature of what now passes for "debate." A lot of people are angry and they get even angrier if you don’t get angry, too.

I’ve always liked the metaphor of the American Melting Pot. I know it’s not a popular one nowadays. Some of us are suspicious of foreigners “coming in to change things” while others worry my particular ethnicity/race/religion/sexual proclivity/social group isn’t sufficiently recognized, appreciated and acknowledged by everybody else. As I suggested in last week’s Labyrinthus, at its old core America is (was?) less a geography than an identity. We are the people who embrace freedom as an inalienable right. The government didn’t (and doesn’t) give it to us—we have it—with apologies to my atheistical friends—from God. Freedom doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want. Medieval philosophers (on the whole wiser than their modern counterparts) called unrestricted freedom by another word—“license”—meaning almost the opposite of what most people take the word to mean today. They understood “license” to mean something like “action without responsibility.” That isn’t freedom. Like it or not (and many won’t), freedom is bound inextricably with morality.Freedom insists I have a God-given right to do what I think I should, but it demands that I recognize the same holds true for every other person. America is an experiment—a 250 year old one—as to whether men and women can live together with that right. Our current inability to face real issues, our tendency to attack one another rather than attack our problems, suggests a dim future for the experiment.

What is a Walker in the Labyrinth to make of it? We cannot ignore it; God put us on the path and He means for us to walk it, if stumblingly. I'll make just an observation or two. In our daily strife—national, familial, personal—you’ll note a recurring tendency. We don’t disagree just about what we think is right or wrong. More viscerally, arguments are built on assumptions about the people we disagree with. Logic doesn’t allow us to disagree about facts—not accurate ones—but we can disagree about the meaning of facts and their importance. That’s not where anger resides. Anger and hatred linger in our confident belief that we know each other’s intentions and that our opponent’s intentions are certainly bad and probably evil.

Jesus said, “Judge not…” and we’ve been assiduously disregarding His words for the past 2,000 years. I choose the collective pronoun purposely here—I judge. Only in the last few years have I come to see how easily and often I judge, and how it’s damaged relationships I cherish. "But we all judge! It’s part of how our minds work!” (That’s me talking—protesting to God because it seems we have an impossible task—we've been given a brain and then told to ignore it when it works.) There are places in Scripture—even in the Gospels—even in the words of Jesus—that seem to say otherwise; where Jesus seems to contradict Himself. Some of His words seem to imply that some form of judgment is necessary. I don’t dispute it, though I do think the matter is more complex than it seems. I prefer for now though, to take His words at face value. To “judge” is not simply to observe facts—to judge is to interpret—to say what something means. It doesn’t simply say, “I see what you’re doing and I disagree with it” it goes further and says “and I know why you are doing it and what you mean by it. I know what your intentions are.”

But we don’t. Or perhaps more accurately, we can do little more than scratch the surface of another’s intention and here’s why: you and I barely know why we do what we do! We don’t know the myriad of things at work in the cobweb corners of our own souls. Even in the highest of human acts—love (agape)—our actions are a confusing mixture of motivations, many having nothing to do with the object of our affection. St Catherine of Siena, one of the boasts of our fallen nature, said that even the love a soul has for God is usually based on what she calls “mercenary love.” St Paul cried out “I don’t even know why I do what I do!” What underlies your love of the things you love or hate of the things you hate? With such limited self-knowledge (if we’re honest enough to admit it), how do we judge the inner workings of others? Joe Wilson, yelled out “You lie!” to President Obama. He didn’t say “Your facts are wrong.” To lie is to intentionally deceive, not make a mistake or exercise poor judgment. The words go not to facts but to character, to inner motivation. Congressman Wilson is as incapable of knowing the President's inner motive as are you and I. Similarly, when ex-President Carter claimed that Wilson’s words or the motivations of the President’s opponents are racially-based, he’s just guessing--and a thousand preconceived notions, faulty memories and unexamined feelings lie somewhere underneath that guess, unseen and unknown. Back and forth it goes: facts and truths have long ago been driven from our discourse.

From one of my favorite books, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers:

Once a brother committed some sin and the monks gathered to judge him. Father Moses the Ethiopian at first refused to go join them, but when they insisted, he filled an old, leaky basket with sand and carried it into the assembly on his back. When the brethren asked him what he was doing, he said "My sins run out behind me, and I do not even see them, and here I come to judge my brother."

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I drew a book for pleasure, and it’s been unadulterated. I briefly recounted O Henry’s life in last week’s Labyrinthus and afterward realized how long it’s been since I actually read any of his short stories. I’ve made up for that this week and will continue on (I got a book with 837 pages of ‘em) well into next week. Most of these I’ve never read but will now always remember: “The Shamrock and the Palm,” “A Madison Square Arabian Night,” “The Foreign Policy of Company 99,” “The Girl and the Graft.” No insightful review this week, my friends. I want to close my computer and pick up the heavy book beside my bed-table. The Collected Stories of O. Henry has 212 of his more than 600 tales. My copy was published by Avenel Books; you can find a decent copy on Amazon for about $5-6.

If you can’t think of a gift for someone, I can’t imagine a better one.


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“How often is it the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign! Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects. By such infamous arts the best and wisest princes are sold to the venal corruption of their courtiers."—the Emperor Diocletian

“Emperors are necessarily the most wretched of men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.”—the Emperor Domitian, two days before his assassination

“Lente festina”—“Hasten slowly”—Suetonius

“Life would be wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.”—Greta Garbo

“I know what's best for me; after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody.”—Claudette Colbert