How often do you see someone, whether it is in person or online, and immediately jump to conclusions?
This temptation is especially present on social media, where we see a news headline, or see a photo on Instagram and immediately characterize a person or group of people.
Often this will include marking someone as our enemy, based on something they did, or on what the shared on social media.
We also run the risk of making quick judgments whenever we go to Mass.
We'll see someone and what they are wearing, and instantly assume something ill of them. Or we may get annoyed by someone's children making a racket at Mass and immediately condemn them as bad parents.
Making hasty judgments is never a good thing and it is a vice we will need to correct.
The cure
In addition to frequent confession, St. Francis de Sales provides a cure in his Introduction to the Devout Life. He explains that love is the cure to quick judgments:
What remedy can we apply?...Drink freely of the sacred wine of love, and it will cure you of the evil tempers which lead you to these perverse judgments. So far from seeking out that which is evil, Love dreads meeting with it, and when such meeting is unavoidable, she shuts her eyes at the first symptom, and then in her holy simplicity she questions whether it were not merely a fantastic shadow which crossed her path rather than sin itself.
He goes so far as to compare rash judgments to a spiritual "jaundice":
Most assuredly the sin of rash judgments is a spiritual jaundice, which makes everything look amiss to those who have it; and he who would be cured of this malady must not be content with applying remedies to his eyes or his intellect, he must attack it through the affections, which are as the soul’s feet. If your affections are warm and tender, your judgment will not be harsh; if they are loving, your judgment will be the same.
St. Francis de Sales even goes so far as to say, "Are we never, then, to judge our neighbor? you ask. Never, my child. It is God Who judges criminals brought before a court of law."
God did not appoint us as a judge, ready to pronounce our own view of people's actions.
Only God knows the secrets of our hearts and this knowledge should spark within us compassion and love of other people.
Don't we want others to have a similar view of us? Don't we want other people to deal with us leniently, not judging our actions?
Our job on earth is not to deal out sentences, but only to have compassion on our enemies and to pray for them. They certainly may have done something wrong, and we can at times speak against it; but we should never condemn them. God is the one who judges and deals out sentences. We are not God.
