Fitting Others Into Patterns: Judging

Fitting others into patterns can be another manner in which community life is destroyed. A while back my friend David Weddle and I were driving home from fishing.  I was sharing a poem with him about community life by William Stafford (see earlier post on community life). I was reciting the lines,

“If you don’t know the kind of person that I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are then a pattern that others made in the world may prevail”.

David said, “Say that last part again”. I repeated, “A pattern that others made in the world may prevail”.

David shared with me a valuable insight and  the significance of those lines as it relates to community life. He talked about “patterns that others have made” or what we call stereotypes. He talked about “Categories” or “patterns” that we “fit” people in to because we really do not know them. I could see how I have done this with people and how it is hurtful

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are”,  is the beginning of the problem.  If we really don’t know each other then we are prone to judge and be judged. It is quite easy to do this if we really do not know the person we are putting in to a pattern. We just assume the person matches the pattern, a pattern that others have made.  And it is far easier to superficially match patterns based on past data, rather than get to know someone deeply.

Perhaps, as Christians we could take this a step further. As Christians we should know each other, or at least begin to know each other in the deeper sense of who we are in God. We should know each other as individuals with unique gifts and life experiences, but sadly even in church we rarely know each other at a deep level.  As the poet says, more often, "The parade of our mutual life gets lost in the dark", And no real community can be established. .

We judge others. I judge others. It happens often. If a group of people who do not know each other share what they do for a living, often people are categorized into a pattern or stereotype. The words: Lawyer, doctor, teacher,  preacher, professor, carpenter, business man, fly fishing guide, all can form images in the minds of listeners. We then might then think we know a pattern. We then categorize.

We even judge other fly fishers. We say things like, “He does not know what he is doing. He can’t cast. He only uses San Juan worms or egg patterns. He can’t use a dry fly. He fishes the same hole every time, (or ‘God forbid’), he uses bait and eats his fish”.

We even judge others for being judgmental. We think we  see a pattern and we just assume that a  person is judgmental.

What is strange is that we tend to think of our judgments and “categories” as being uniquely our own insight into the character of others. We think putting people into these patterns is a reflection of our own individualistic and independent wisdom. This leads to a certain sense of pride and smugness even though the reality is that often someone else made the pattern. Remember the words of the poet suggest we merely follow, “as elephants parade holding each elephants tail; . . . a pattern that others made may prevail” and “following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”

We see in the Gospels how Jesus was judged and “pattern-ized.”  If he was seen eating with the “wrong” people they put him into a category. He, more than anyone, knew the pain of not being known and misunderstood.  Strange how none of those patterns or categories fit him because he did not match any known pattern on Earth.

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And because we are at least in some small way,  “in God”, the patterns we think we see in others really don’t match either. As soon as we try to fit someone into a pattern or stereotype seemingly out of no where some thing from beyond the pattern rises as from a far off land  or as a trout rises, and we are pleasantly surprised and proved to be wrong.