PROJECTING ONTO 

AND 

JUDGING OTHERS 

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this Monday in the 12th Week in Ordinary Time is, “Projecting Onto and Judging Others.”

When I read today’s gospel from the Sermon on the Mount - Matthew 7: 1-5 - when Jesus says, “Stop judging” - I thought: “Preach about judging.”

Then Jesus talks about noticing splinters in another’s eye and missing the big wooden beam in our own eye - I thought about how often we project onto others our motivations and our assumptions as a way of avoiding looking in the mirror or looking at oneself.

Needing to think about these issues I entitled my short homily, 

Then I entitled my homily,  “Projecting Onto and Judging Others.”

JUDGING

First a comment about judging.

We judge all the time. It’s normal.

When I took the Myers-Briggs Test about different personality types - I found out that according to Carl Jung - some people are more judgmental than others. Some people are more perceptive than others.

The test uses the letter P to label those who tend to be perceptive and J for  those who tend to be more judgmental at first.

The J walks into a church or a room or a house and says, “This is a beautiful church or this is an ugly house or this is wrong color for this room.

The P says, “Interesting colors.” Or “I wonder about the stained glass windows in this church. They are different. There has to be a back story."

Jung would hold that we don't choose to be one more than the other or what have you.

I was taught that it’s the second instance that counts.

So those who confess being judgers are off the hook on the first count.

It’s the second instance that counts. So if we judge another spontaneously, we need to say, “I don’t know this or that about so and so - and then do what Jesus said, “Stop judging.”

PROJECTIONS

We can do the same with our projections about others.

Everyone knows what a projector is - it’s a machine that projects a light on a wall. If we put a slide or a film in front of that light - it shoots that picture onto the wall or screen.

So we project onto others motives, reasons, why a person is doing what they are doing.

Surprise - we project our films - those inside our mind and experience - onto another.

Key word: “OUR” - as in our motives, our reasons, whereas the other person has their own films, their own intents - not ours.

Us males are doing this all the time. How about the ladies. We’re watching a pretty girl walk down the street and we see a man looking at her as she walks by. If they are like me,  we assume he too is looking at her the way we are looking at her.

That's first instance. However,if we talk to each other, if we are in communion with another person, if we really communicate with each other, we might find out that the other person is looking  - maybe even squinting - at the lady walking down the  street - because he's wondering if it's a girl he once dated in high school.  

CONCLUSION

In both instances, the stress in this homily is that we do some rethinking, rejudging, saying to ourselves, "I don’t know." It’s in second thoughts, where we can stop judging others and stop throwing stones at others.