judge yourself, love others

St Ephrem talks to us today in A Year with the Church Fathers about judging. He says that we should focus our judgmental attitude on ourselves... concern ourselves with our OWN holiness... and not on other people. Mother Teresa takes it a step further in the quote above, and says that we should be loving other people, not judging them.

Now, let me address something quickly to get it out of the way. It's not judging people to say an action is wrong. I'm not judging murderers when I say murder is wrong. I'm not judging adulterers when I say adultery is wrong. We most definitely can, and should, have a moral standard, and that means knowing right from wrong. When someone tries to say that killing people is OK, we should definitely speak up and say it is not OK. Same with all of the sins.

As Fulton Sheen wisely said, we should only tolerate people, not bad ideas or morals. And we should only be intolerant of bad ideas and morals, not of people.

But that aside, we should concern ourselves with our OWN holiness, and give everyone else the benefit of the doubt.

I go one step beyond that, though. Yes, we should focus on our own holiness, and judge ourselves rather than others. But we should love ourselves, too.

God, teach us to judge the ones we should - ourselves, and ideas. Help us love everyone else.