Was talking to a friend about a deep hurt I'd suffered years back: someone who I'd thought was a friend had pilloried me to my face and behind my back, warping things I'd said out of context, blowing them out of proportion, giving them a subtext I'd never intended --a cruel portrait that stunned me with its sheer unfairness. The incident had done very real harm, a spreading, deepening pool of destruction that took a long, long time for me to forgive truly and to resolve.

The friend I was talking to took pencil and sheet of paper and covered the paper lightly with little marks. We can, he said, pick out this mark and that mark and cobble together an image: a map of the other. A graph of the data. An image, even a portrait. It can be a true portrait, he said, or it can be a cartoon. I had been caricatured, unfairly. But that wasn't my problem; it was the other person's.

Good analysts (scientists, for example) take much time and trouble to gather as much data as they reasonably can. They weigh their data carefully, check and recheck potential trouble spots, and determine what the "best fit" line is--and it's by no means an easy or straightforward business. Significant outlyers --data that are real and don't fit the line--trouble them; these data may need further investigation. Above all, good analysts are uncomfortably aware that the models they build may be just plain wrong, because we don't ever have all the information, and there may be forces at play that they can't even imagine..

The cartoonist doesn't work that way at all. The cartoonist seizes upon a very partial (in both senses!) group of data, twists them out of shape and blows them out of proportion, neglecting information that doesn't fit the predetermined lines. The cartoonist uses the "facts" to construct an image to suit the cartoonist's own purposes. If the portrait is unfair, who cares? as long as it's funny, or makes the point.

The process can, of course, go the other way: we can carefully select and twist the data to idealize others or (more dangerously) ourselves, leaving out the uncomfortable parts and blowing the good stuff out of proportion--setting the "bad" data off to one side and not paying them any mind. It's as though we take all our dark bits and stack them off just behind and to the left, slightly out of sight. Of course, the problem with that approach is that in time, the pile of dark bits tends to start shimmying and quivering and taking on a life of its own....

Back to the assessment business. It's a very natural process, and probably a necessary one for living in this world, that we assess other people: is this a good potential friend or mate? Do I trust her enough to do business with her? Can I believe what he says? This is why we tend to make maps of each other, and not one of us doesn't. Two problems arise: when we do a really rotten job of mapping; and when we assume that God's doing what we're doing.

But:

If God is indeed "about our paths and our ways," knowing us backward, forward, and inside out, then God does indeed have all the data. And if God does indeed verily know how many beans make five--is it worth worshipping any god who doesn't?--then God already knows the image that all the data truly fit: the taste and weight and shape and smell of our perfected selves. In fact, God created the image, but gave us the option of not being that way--or at least, not all at once. Only God knows what we'll make of our souls in the whole fullness of time.

Take the ill-paid, slightly rabbity, nervous file clerk, low in her organization--the one who never looks you in the eye, whose nails are bitten to the quick, who has a nervous tic. God's image of her may be of a serene woman of quiet but indomitable courage, sunny and balanced as happily in her own soul as a bird on the wing. In her life, she may make choices that take her more closely toward, or further away from, that ideal. But God knows what her soul is supposed to be like, and he loves both who she is and what she is capable of becoming.

Do you judge her on the tic and the bitten nails--blow those up to giant proportions, forgetting (for example) her kindness and helpfulness? Or do you stop to wonder (in kindness and empathy, not in psychopathologizing!) what's made her so nervous--what small deaths of loss or humiliation, what failures in nurturance, what strains and stresses, have made her timid and downcast? The first is judgment; the second, discernment. We are, as Christians, forbidden to judge others: which does not mean that we're not allowed to say "no" to them--as in "no, you may not rabbit-punch that kid in the kidneys" or "no, you may not exceed the speed limit by an unreasonable amount." God did not give us heads simply to support our hair, or what's left of it.

We are, however, explicitly told again and again that the assessment of another human being is God's business. We're told this because in fact we make rotten judges much of the time. We take a single datum--someone's sexuality or skin colour, their socioeconomic status, their political convictions, their religious belief--and blow it totally out of proportion, using it to caricature the other without mercy or real justice, almost always so that we can establish our own superiority. (Funny, how many people can't seem to stand tall unless they're standing on someone else's face...) That isn't discernment, and it's not even simple logic. The crudest ordinary human justice would admit that the other person has quite a lot more to him or her than that.

No organism is simple enough to describe with a handful of points, not even a paramecium. What, then, makes us think that we can adequately discern and judge the worth of a human soul, in all its complexity, on one or two bits of information, given how very little we know? That's why God claims the business of judging for Godself. God knows, we do a really lousy job of it. Look at what we did to God's son, after all.

My friend the cartoonist is worse than most--bad enough (despite his considerable intelligence and perception) that I have to wonder what stone he's got in his sock. But my own judgment isn't really much better than his. I too draw cartoons. See? I've just drawn a caricature of a cartoonist.

Leave it to God. And if He can love us as dearly as He does, knowing us so intimately and well, surely to God we can love God, ourselves and each other? Or at least make a good stab at it. It is, after all, what God has explicitly told us we should do.