Meditation for judgmental bastards like me. -Nadia Bolz-Weber

The Last Supper - a collage created by House for All Sinners and Saints out of images that represented people we wished Jesus DIDN’T invite to his table, but he does anyway because that’s just the way he is.

Meditation for judgmental bastards like me

“See everything, judge little, forgive much.” -Richard Rohr

I was so desperate in 2020 that I did what I thought I would never do: I started meditating. It never suited me, meditation. I could never get my mind to stop (I have a monkey mind – always moving, swinging from branch to branch, throwing feces at anything it deems threatening). So meditation always felt like an exercise in self-loathing and I failed to see how that was spiritually useful to me.  

But a friend turned me onto Jeff Warren’s Meditation for Beginners on CALM and I was hooked.

My life last Fall, Winter and Spring was so predictable day to day that starting a new habit was just doable.

But then when I was fully vaccinated and told I was “free to move about the cabin”, I did. This Summer my days have been less predictable and without even realizing it, I stopped meditating.

Until this morning.

Meditation gives me the ability to observe myself in a whole new way – to know when I was riding on the monkey mind train and to pull the brakes and get off, when normally I would ride that train to the end of the line every time, without even being aware I was on it. 

So yesterday I had a “meditation moment” in the middle of my day – not a moment of peace and equanimity but the opposite: I realized that I was on a monkey mind train I didn't want to be on, one I had no memory of boarding. It was the “Judging everything and everyone around me” train . But I realized that it was not the situation I was in yesterday, but my thoughts about the situation that were making me unhappy.

I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted by my own thinking - how I am always taking in what is happening and processing it through some fucked up criticism calculator to determine how far whatever is happening is from what it SHOULD be. 

It is taking longer than it SHOULD for my partner to get ready to leave and now he is making us late.

I am on hold with Delta airlines longer than I SHOULD be.

The coffee I ordered SHOULD be hotter than this.

I really SHOULD try that KETO thing.

The person driving in front of me SHOULD be getting over to the right lane because they are only going 4 miles over the speed limit and I want to go 5.

Years ago when I was ranting to my friend Sara about a situation in my life in which no one was doing what they “should”, she listened patiently (even though she had heard a version of the same rant several times already) and then said, “Nadia, you’re right. About all of it. And . . . it doesn’t matter.”

WHAT? What else matters?!?

The cliche goes: you can either be happy or you can be right. 

But I very much want to be both, please. Thank you.

My friend Phil led a funeral recently for a young musician in his town. There were to be several musical offerings during the service by her fellow musicians and Phil started the service with these words “Every moment of our lives offers us the possibility of judgement or healing.”

We can critique the music at our friend’s funeral, or we can just let that shit go and be healed by it.

I think about how Jesus said “consider the lilies of the field” not “critique the lilies of the field”.

Those lilies could be straighter. Whose field are those lilies in and why don’t they care enough to keep it weeded? I prefer yellow lilies and these are white. If Jesus really cared about me he would know that I am allergic to lilies.

Maybe in this next phase of life, I can manage to “see everything, judge little and forgive much” as Richard Rohr says instead of “see only what I want to, judge everything, forgive nothing”, because living in a constant place of distain for how far the distance is between how things are and how I think they “SHOULD” be is not good for my skin. Or my relationships. Or my heart. 

Do you guys have any practices that help you with this? I’m gonna try and meditate regularly again.