When I was in high school one of the books on the required reading list was Margaret Laurence’s “The Diviners”.<\/p>\n
This book changed my life. I couldn’t tell you how, exactly, only that it touched me deeply and went straight to my heart and stayed there. The protagonist, Morag, spoke to me directly. I felt she was my best friend in the world.<\/p>\n
The lessons that Morag learned, I learned, and Laurence’s imagery, characters and truly great storytelling have stayed with me these many years. The writing is so<\/span> good.<\/p>\n One of the myriad lessons that Christie, Morag’s guardian, teaches her is “Judge not lest ye be judged.”<\/p>\n A quick search tells me it’s from Matthew 7:1.<\/p>\n As a young teenager who fancied herself a soothsayer, these words made a whole lot of sense to me and I would often preach them, believing I had the authority to do so. Youthful arrogance, anyone?<\/p>\n It wasn’t until my late 20’s when a rude awakening brought me to finally admit the truth about myself: I am judgmental.<\/p>\n It’s a painful thing to admit and yet I know it’s probably true of all of us. We’re human. That’s what we do.<\/p>\n Yesterday I was speaking with a young woman I’m helping to guide through the rocky waters of the healing path and lo and behold I found myself talking about LOVE at the very same time I was casting judgment on some of her other teachers.<\/p>\n Ouch.<\/p>\n Of course, I didn’t realize this until later when I was obsessing over the session. Something was wrong. What was it?<\/p>\n A little digging, some sharing with a friend and voila! I’m humbled.<\/p>\n I once knew a man, an Elder, a Great Chief, who said to me, “Celia, we can’t get so heavenly that we end up being no earthly good.”<\/p>\n I would love to be able to tell you that all this inner work I do has freed me from the bondage of Celia and I never judge anyone anymore. Ha! But I strive for that freedom and, to the best of my ability, I admit when I’m wrong.<\/p>\n It doesn’t feel good to say, “I judged that person.” But it feels good to accept it and let it go.<\/p>\n Inspiring Message of the Day: I’m human. I’m on the path. I’m doing my best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was in high school one of the books on the required reading list was Margaret Laurence’s “The Diviners”. This book changed my life. I couldn’t tell you how, exactly, only that it touched me deeply and went straight to my heart and stayed there. The protagonist, Morag, spoke to me directly. I felt…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forgiveness","category-inspiration","category-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celiamcbride.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}