Judgment and community

“The monk must die to his neighbor and never judge him at all in any way whatever.” - Father Moses

One of the most common misunderstandings of monasticism that I encounter among well-intentioned, social-justice-oriented folks is that monastics run, coward-like, from community rather than serve in its midst.

Of course, it doesn’t take long after visiting any monastic community to see that this isn’t true — they’re all involved in serving the outside community in various ways. But more than that, immediately one sees that these people are living in a particular form of community that takes its responsibility to one another far more seriously than common society.

This is true of the desert fathers. Far from abandoning their neighbors, they understood that the normal way of world not only lives in casual disregard of neighbor, but that our fleeting interactions naturally lead us right into judgment of neighbor. It is not from interacting with neighbors that the desert fathers flee: they flee the shallowness of them. They flee the easily-held resentments and conflicts that exist between people who go on with life as usual and really do not deeply care about those around them.

Dying to neighbor, for the monk, means entering into a community where everyone present takes their responsibilities to community seriously.

In his book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens, Rowan Williams writes,

If our life and our death are with the neighbor, this spells out something of what our "death" with the neighbor might mean: it is to renounce the power of judgment over someone else — a task hard enough indeed to merit being described as death… Moses says, "If you are occupied with your own faults, you have no time to see those of your neighbor." [p. 14]

A friend of mine wisely asked his Facebook audience to consider this a time to become better people, rather than a chance to draw deeper political lines and stoke our hatreds and judgments of neighbor. I’m with him in seeing a lot of the former happening.

But I’m also seeing something of the spirit of the desert fathers around Calvary and beyond — questions arising about our most vulnerable neighbors and congregants that haven’t always been asked (or at least by so many.) The lonely senior citizen was always isolated — we’re beginning to open our eyes to them. The dependably invisible structures to serve the poor were always under-resourced — how have we failed to consider their good on the same level as ours? The hard worker depending on the gig-system economy was always vulnerable — we’re just beginning to ask if it’s right.

As you flee to the desert, how are you entering more deeply into care for neighbor? How are you dying to judgment?