Judgment, Struggle and Love (or, How to Sound Pretentious by Using the Word "Existentialism")

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and somewhere in the middle of our hour-and-a-half-long conversation we started talking about judgment - how we both have these tendencies to cast down judgment upon others from our own position on high (because we're right, dammit), and also how we're both learning more and more that judgment wounds people, and inflicting those wounds is never worth the perceived value of whatever ideal we're holding the world to at that particular time.  My mom and I come to the Bible from somewhat different perspectives (the main difference being that she comes to the Bible a lot more often than I do), but we're both pretty sure that God's injunction not to judge others is a rewording or different manifestation of the command to love others.  As we were discussing how our understanding of judgment has changed, I found myself using the language of struggle - that I see over and over again in the biblical text a struggle for communities to figure out how to stay in healthy relationships with each other and with God, that difficult things and interpersonal and social conflicts are never totally eradicated, that new questions and concerns are always threatening to break down relationships, and that the important thing for us today as readers is not necessarily how these specific communities delineated the boundaries of their relationships but that we learn from them how to stay committed to each other and to the struggle.  In terms of judgment, I think that when we place more value on an abstract ideal than on the person standing right in front of us, we have checked out of the struggle.

In the middle of this diatribe (and apologies for being preachy), I thought about how much I've been shaped by the work of Albert Camus - conveniently located at #6 on my list, next in line for the blog-treatment.  In his lifetime, Camus resisted being labeled as an existentialist thinker, but many of the themes that appear in his literature do seem to be existentialist (if that can even be defined, blah blah blah).  The importance of choosing to live fully in each moment, to create our identities in our choices, to see the gravity of the human plight and to respond by living anyway - to be committed to the struggle - those are things that show up again and again for Camus. 

I have this weird thing about authors I love - I need to know about who they are or were as a person, as a writer.  Art has that strange relationship of being both eternally connected to and infinitely separate from the artist at the same time.  When I was reading Camus, learning of his involvement in politics, labor rights, and the liberation of Algeria helped to flesh out what struggle really meant to him.  Life is hard, and it will continue to be hard, but that doesn't mean that we should give up.  And when we are faced our neighbor, to whom we are also eternally connected and from whom we are infinitely separate, we must resist our inclinations let the separateness overwhelm the connection.