One Source of Love
Yet before you can love your neighbor—your brother or sister—as yourself, you must first love yourself. And to first love yourself, you must know that God loves you now and loves you always.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream
Richard Rohr connects our ability to love others with our ability to receive God’s love.
Authentic love is of one piece. How we love anything is how we love everything. Jesus commands us to “Love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” and he connects the two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor, saying they are “like” one another (Matthew 22:39). So often, we think this means to love our neighbor with the same amount of love—as much as we love ourselves—when it really means that it is the same Source and the same Love that allows us to love ourselves, others, and God at the same time! That is unfortunately not the way most people understand love, compassion, and forgiveness—yet it is the only way they ever work.
We cannot sincerely love another or forgive offenses inside of dualistic consciousness. Many pastors and priests have done the people of God a great disservice by preaching the gospel to them but not giving them the tools to live it out. As Jesus put it, “Cut off from the vine, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The “vine and the branches” offer one of the greatest Christian mystical images of the non-duality between God and the soul. In and with God, I can love everything and everyone—even my enemies. Alone and by myself, my willpower and intellect will seldom be able to love in difficult situations over time. Many folks try to love by willpower, with themselves as the only source. They try to obey the second commandment without the first. It never works long term.
Finally, of course, there’s a straight line between love and suffering. If we love anyone or anything deeply and greatly, it’s fairly certain we’ll soon suffer because we have offered control to another, and the cost of self-giving will soon show itself. Undoubtedly, this is why we are told to be faithful in our loves, because such long-term loyalty and truly conscious love will always lead us to the necessary pruning (John 15:2) of the narcissistic self.
Until we love and until we suffer, we all try to figure out life and death with our minds. Then a Larger Source opens up within us and we “think” and feel quite differently through “knowing the Love, which is beyond all knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). Thus, Jesus would naturally say something like, “This is my commandment: you must love one another!” (John 13:34). Authentic love (which is always more than an emotion) initially opens the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps that door open for mind, body, and will to enter. I suspect for most of us that is the work of a lifetime.
Knowing Our Neighbors
Rabbi Sharon Brous draws on her Jewish tradition to name the dignity of every human being.
[A] Rabbinic text … from the ninth century declares that every person is accompanied, at all times, by a procession of angels crying out, “Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching!” Every person, like royalty. And yet, again and again, the image of the Holy One is controlled and contained, humiliated and degraded, incarcerated and incapacitated, shot and killed before our very eyes. How do we keep missing all those angels, with their trumpets and proclamations, desperate to rouse us to the dignity of every human being?
The call to awaken to the image of God, to the dignity of every person, has been the driving force of my religious life, the very heart of my faith…. What would it mean to build a society in which every person is treated as an image of the Divine? How would this affect our relationships with our neighbors, our coworkers, the stranger lying beneath the stained blankets and trash outside Starbucks? Wouldn’t it compel us to recast the cultures of our schools, organizations, and faith communities? How would it impact health care, education, public policy?… How would it transform law enforcement and criminal justice systems—where today judgment is too often rendered based on whether a person is Black or white, rich or poor, rather than guilty or innocent?
Brous shares a story illustrating how nearness and neighborliness lead to loving action:
My friend goes to a church of Caribbean immigrants in downtown Los Angeles. One day his pastor preached: Say you’re walking in downtown LA, or Chicago, or New York. A naked man runs in front of you on the sidewalk, screaming and cursing. What do you do? Most of us, of course, briskly cross the street. That guy’s unwell, we think.
But say you live in a tiny town of maybe fifty households. You’re walking around one day when a naked man runs in front of you on the sidewalk, screaming and cursing. And because you live in a tiny town, you know this man … it’s Henry. Last week, you just happen to know, there was a terrible tragedy, and fire burned Henry’s house to the ground, leaving him with nothing. What do you do?
“Henry,” you say, “come with me, friend. You need a warm meal and a safe place to stay.”
What does it take to shift our collective consciousness from stranger who is unwell to Henry, my neighbor, created in God’s own image?…
The challenge is to imagine a fundamentally different reality: a world in which we recognize and fight for each other’s dignity. A world in which we … train our hearts to see even the people others might render invisible. A world in which we recognize that we—images of the Divine—are all bound up in the bond of life with one another. And our hardest and holiest work is not to look away.
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| The Danger of a Dis-Integrated Life |
 In Jesus’ description of the final judgment in Matthew 25, we often overlook a startling detail. Jesus said the King will judge all people by how they treated him when he was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, and in prison. Both the righteous and the wicked, however, respond the same way: “Lord, when did we see you hungry…thirsty…a stranger…naked…sick or in prison?” Jesus answered both groups the same way, “I say to you, as you did [or did not do] to one of the least of these you did [or did not do] it to me.”Here’s the surprising and important detail—it is clear from the story that the righteous showed compassion and kindness without knowingthey were serving Jesus. It wasn’t like the righteous were in on the secret and the wicked were not. The righteous did not offer food, drink, clothing, or medicine to strangers because they knew each person was Jesus incognito. That raises a critical question: Why did the righteous show kindness if they weren’t doing it to earn points on God’s final exam?The answer is that they lived integrated lives. The righteous do not segment their lives into categories of “sacred” and “ordinary;” they do not view some activities or people as important to God and others as unimportant. They do not limit their devotion to Sunday morning or the confines of a church or cathedral. Their love for God flows into all aspects of their lives, including how they see and act toward strangers. Justice marks all of their relationships. There is no indication in Jesus’ story that the “goats” whom he casts away were irreligious or followers of bad theology. Their great error was that they kept their devotion to God within the neat boundaries of religious activity. Their commitment to Christ was disconnected from the other parts of their existence. Therefore, when they encountered the hungry, sick, and poor in the ordinary course of life their faith had no role to play.The question Matthew 25 ought to provoke is this: How has your devotion to Christ and commitment to kingdom justice been integrated into every aspect of your life, or do you prefer to keep religion at church? DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 25:31-46 PROVERBS 19:17 1 JOHN 3:17-18 WEEKLY PRAYERFrom an African ChristianO God, enlarge my heart that it may be big enough to receive the greatness of your love. Stretch my heart that it may take into it all those who with me around the world believe in Jesus Christ. Stretch it that it may take into it all those who do not know him, but who are my responsibility because I know him. And stretch it that it may take in all those who are not lovely in my eyes, and whose hands I do not want to touch; through Jesus Christ, my Savior. Amen. |
