One morning before dawn, Sam wakes to sounds of his next-door neighbour screaming and swearing. He hears banging sounds, as of things being thrown around. He knows an older man, young woman and a child live there. Does he mind his own business? Does he excoriate them for waking him up? Does he investigate or go back to sleep?

On Sunday, Sam is at morning Mass. Being a parishioner there, he knows many people. During the communion hymn, as he prepares to go up to receive, he unintentionally observes a certain couple preparing to go too. The thought comes to him instantly:  should that person be going to communion? Is Sam to judge or avert his eyes?

At every moment, we have the opportunity to judge. How can we tell whether it’s a temptation or an invitation? When are we to judge and when refrain from judging? Even to stop each time and sort out which to do would be impossible; continual decisions are made mostly unawares or out of habit. That’s why it’s important to build our habits carefully, as St. Dorotheos of Gaza urged, “not despising the little things since they lead to greater things.” A long-ago monk and abbot, who for years looked after his monastic community, Dorotheos wrote them a treatise entitled “On Refusal to Judge One’s Neighbour.” He wisely saw judging others as one of the most serious harms we can do. “You know how great a wrong it is to judge your neighbour,” he writes. “What is graver than this?  What does God hate and turn away from so much as this?”

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Each of us stands before every other human person as mystery. But since we all want to be God, we all want to judge. No wonder Jesus continually urges us against judging, explicitly as in Matthew 7:1: “Do not judge so that you will not be judged,” and in stories, actions and parables like the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:21-35).St. Paul warns even against judging oneself: “I do not even judge myself… It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Corinthians 4). Refraining from judging is one of the most sweat-inducing, blood-wresting commandments of all.

Life at times requires us to make judgments. We call this “discernment.” It never means judging other people good or bad — God never takes away from anyone the imago dei, which he freely gives each person. Yet there are times when we must judge a situation and make a decision accordingly.  For example, imagine a relative of yours invites you to a weekend gathering at her home, explaining that all assembled family and friends will witness her assisted suicide. Might fear of judging make us fail to discern as we ought?

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Our entire lifetime as Christians might be devoted to this: learning how to see and care for others with discernment, but without judging.  Most of us go about our lives laden with judgment, our own or others’; adding to the judgment-burden is never productive.   

It’s comforting, in a way, to find that human tendencies and needs haven’t changed much since the sixth century when Dorotheos hand-wrote with a reed pen by candlelight. Being practical as well as prayerful, he distilled three fundamental ways we tend to judge others. The first is “running a person down,” everyone’s favourite activity of gossip, which means talking about people who aren’t present. The second is condemning another: “How could she have done that?” “He should be ashamed of himself.” “Who does she think she is?” The third is contempt, which “adds to condemnation the desire to set someone at nought, as if the neighbour were a bad smell which has to be got rid of as something disgusting.”

Dorotheos writes the treatise for his brothers, not because he judges them, but because he cares for them. Every sentence bears his wounds and scars from wrestling his own and others’ inclination to judge. “If we have true love with sympathy and patient labour, we shall not go about scrutinizing our neighbour’s shortcomings,” he concludes, but we will have the courage to correct our neighbour, when needed, by patience and love.

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How can we ever get there? Not by sheer grit and willpower. There’s another way. Dorotheos leaves us with the image of the world as a circle, with God at the centre. If people are points on the circumference, then the closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another, and the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God. Dorotheos shows us that our desire to be God is fulfilled, not by judging, but by refusing to judge our neighbour.

In the end, we are never dispensed from non-judging, but there is more. The real proof of our non-judging another is to hold a genuine love for them. How do we know we have such love? If the person can actually sense that we love them.