Continuing with Joy Mead’s Making Peace, the Tea Time group pondered peace last week, trying to leap from abstraction to concrete realities of peace and its lack in our lives, our world.
We took paper pebbles and wrote words of peace on them and made together a rock garden, a path, a wall, and a chaos (the chaos was mine).
Then, drawing random paper pebbles, we write our own peace poems. I drew “being not judgmental”.
| From kathy's photostream on Flickr |
How do I be not?
Whose skull shall I hold
aloft in my palm
when,
Hamlet-like,
I ask the
being not question?
What judgment shall
I not levy
in the court of my mind
today?
What tragedy shall I not write
with my judging eyes
today?
Whom shall I not hang
on the gallows
of my condemnation
today?
To be the judge
or not . . .
It is hardly a question
of course I shall judge you
It is my job
isn’t it?
What a lovely poem, Beth! I, too, struggle with judgementalism. When I find myself doing thus,I bless the person(s), and I try to think of something opposite to be FOR. It is easy in today's world to be anti-something or other. I like to think that I am FOR peace, and that that is my job.
ReplyDeleteMarilyn, Such good and practical wisdom - bless instead of curse or judge and being FOR rather than against - you're so right -we seem to live in a time and space that invites and seduces us to be 'against' virtually everything! Thanks for the reminder - and I think I'm going to amend the poem - same thrust - but with some 'nots' (oh, irony!)
ReplyDeleteI might be misunderstanding judgmental.i think of making judgments as out of my control.....i just have thoughts about others and situations that pop in to my head....i have no idea of how to stop this ...i think where i feel a concern is what i do with my judgment...i try to be as loving as i know how to be no matter what my judgment ...i this makes me sound better than i am....this is what my mother insisted upon..always be nice to everyone..is there some way to not have judgments ? Maybe i have been doing this wrong...how does god deal with judgment...? Ann
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