Standing up on the ladder, the heat gun buzzing gently in one hand while my scraper peels chunks of softened paint from the porch... mostly I keep my attention on what I'm doing, but like any small-town person, I keep one eye on who's going where. My neighbour drives by, probably en route to the supermarket; she honks and I wave back with my scraper. Three bored teens on bicycles do wheelies on their way downtown. Two middle-aged women, talking intently, stride swiftly on their constitutional. I know they're walking the Square--up to the corner, south across the creek, east past the hospital, north along the main drag, back to this street. And here he comes, as he does quite often, shambling up the south side of the road: the guy I think of as the Ruined Man.

If you live in a small town, you know people without knowing them. Their faces are familiar as the back of your hand, but you may not have a name to go with the face. So you come up with personal monikers: She Who Sucks Lemons; Man With Wen; Big Guy Who Used to Work at the Beer Store; How On Earth Does She Look So Young After All These Years? This man I always think of as the Ruined Man. He's smallish, slight, losing the battle between going bald and going grey. His dull gaze is fixed on something before him and his pendulous lower lip is always adangle. He looks both expressionless and inwardly haunted, if that's possible. He shambles as he walks, moving quickly and jerkily, his body at a slight forward cant, his arms dangling before him. I don't know what ails him, but clearly it's pretty serious.

I see him almost every day, but I don't have a clue who he is. Was he born this way, or did some accident damage him? A stroke? Some sort of disease? I wonder maybe if he fried his brain on drugs, years ago. I never see him with anyone else. I have no idea where or how he lives: With family? On a disability pension? In the ordinary way of things, I probably never will know anything about him, either, although I suppose I could ask around....

Every time I see him, I'm struck by the thought that he is as precious in God's eyes as the best of us. Yes, he is damaged goods. There's no doubt about that. Whatever promise got laid down when his parents conceived him, it will not in this life come to fruition. He's only a Ruined Man, a village idiot walking endlessly through an undistinguised little town in one of the less fetching parts of a large Canadian province. There is nothing special about him at all, nothing to praise--except that he is a soul and as such, infinitely valuable.

Which is a good and pleasant thought, and such things ordinarily feel good... but today, there was a sort of squiggle to one side of the thought, like the odd lines and wavers you get in ocular migraines. It took me a few minutes, long enough to strip the paint off one carved bracket, to figure out what was bothering me.

This morning, I had been in a large and glossy suburban supermarket in one of the city's largest and glossiest subdivisions, picking up some oddments. On a weekday morning, the people in such places tend to be young mothers and the prosperous retired. I'd been watching the young women with their children and feeling grateful for not living among trim suburbanites in pastel separates, whose youthful slightly petulant faces are lightly made up, whose blond hair is impeccable, and whose blank-faced impeccably nourished children are in all-natural fibres. I'd rather be with the other rural slobs down at the B & H (Your Independent Grocer)..

Yeah. Right. It's wrong to judge and dismiss someone like the Ruined Man, seeing only the damage and forgetting that he's one of God's chilluns, but it's okay for me to write off a bunch of young suburban housewives. I don't think so.

Oh. "When you see a louse in someone else's hair, always check your own scalp for nits of the same species..."

It's easy for the prosperous to look down on those in adversity, especially if the prosperous have never known adversity--or if they've had the luck to escape from it and the delusion that they got out purely by their own exertions. But it's also easy for those in adversity to look down on the prosperous. True, adversity is something like sex or childbirth or bungee-cord jumping: imagination isn't enough, you have to have been there. And therefore, I tend to think that those who have gone through the Valley of the Shadow may understand a few things better than those who have not. That's probably why Our Lord had so much use for the poor and broken-hearted.

No one ever completely knows another person, heart and soul. I don't even know myself well enough to be sure that I'm a Good Guy or a Bad Guy, self-delusion being one of the trickiest of all problems to manage. I don't know the Ruined Man. I also don't know these suburban women. I can't form an opinion of his character, or theirs. I can't decide whether he's a good soul or someone I'd rather not get close to--but I can't decide about them either, not without more information. Ultimately, only God has all the information, and so only God can properly judge.

Of course we have to make practical decisions on a day-to-day basis. In reality, I can't exactly see myself settling down for a cup of tea and a cosy heart-to-heart either with the Ruined Man--because whatever the state of his soul, I don't think he's got a whole lot of mental capacity--or with the suburban ladies, because on past experience, we're apt not to have much in common. I think I'd be apt to have a certain amount of difficulty talking civilly and cordially to a certain well-known rabidly homophobic Baptist preacher, because I cannot escape the strong suspicion that he's nuts, or evil, or both. (They are not mutually exclusive.) We do have to act judiciously: is this one suitable to be my friend? Is this the one I should marry?

So what's the difference? I think being judicious and being judgmental differ in two fundamental respects:

First, the latter involves ego and the former should not. I don't get a little buzz of smug self-satisfaction in coming to the conclusion that the preacher has got some big fat psychological and spiritual problems; that conclusion is the inevitable outcome of his behaviour. There really are evil people out there; I know, because I've seen 'em. I can, however, get a little buzz of smug self-satisfaction whenever I think of smug self-satisfied fat-cat provincial politicians. Oops. Not a good idea. As my favourite theologian (hi Ma!) once observed, "so often righteous indignation is only self-righteousness." And so often, being judgmental about others is such a convenient way of protecting one’s own ego from reality’s painful nudges. “Well, I may not be perfect, but compared to that @#$%^# over there ....” The most judgmental people I ever knew were also the ones most plagued by insecurity.

And second, being judicious involves discernment, not snap judgments. Some of the poor are good and unfortunate people. Some are indeed lazy layabouts. But you can't class the poor as being predominantly one or the other: it's case-by-case. Similarly, some of the rich are indeed self-indulgent selfish spoiled brats; others are genuinely good and thoughtful souls. You can't tell till you look more closely.

I'd still rather err on the side of the Ruined Man than I would on the side of wealthy suburbia, because there's always that chunk at the end of Matthew 25 to contend with: when we are lovingly and compassionately present to those who are broken or wounded, suffering and in need, we are ministering to God Godself. But I must also be careful to remember that the rich, too, are God's children, and that they have their own pains and troubles.

I waved at the Ruined Man, from my perch on the ladder, but of course he didn't wave back. I don't think he takes in much. Poor soul.

(For Chris R., with love)