This is the second part of a series in which frank confession of a fault paves the way to spiritual enrichment. Enjoy...
I confess: I am a kindergartener when it comes to love. Now mind you, I'm not talking about dating and romance and that sort of thing. I make no claims about my ability to sweep a girl off her feet (and were I to make such claims, I wouldn't publish them on this Blog!). No, I'm talking about real Love, the theological and ethical concept, the kind of love that impels us to capitalize its first letter. In short, I'm talking about the way Christ teaches us to relate to every other person in our lives.
It's kind of amazing, isn't it? We are told to love our neighbor as ourself, and we can easily understand this simple dictum. But do we really live it out? I often find myself confounded by Jesus' words that follow the Golden Rule in Luke's Gospel:
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. (Lk 6:32-33)
Whenever I read this passage, I have a sort of "Oh, yeah" moment in which I say, "Oh, yeah." I say this because I am reminded of how rarely I live this out in my daily existence. The autopilot of my life has not been programmed to include this sort of ethic. And that is an unfortunate fact for me, because this ethic is at the heart of all Christian ethics: God loves every person He created, and so we must love them, too. All of our interpersonal morality stems from this foundation.
As I said, I often neglect this core teaching of Christ. I am quite good at loving those who love me. I respond positively to people who like me, and that makes them like me even more. It's the exact opposite of a vicious circle. It's quite wonderful, in fact. And there's nothing wrong with it. Provided we don't live for human glory, it is right for us to love those who love us.
But the problem lies in the fact that I don't nurture such love for people who don't love me, or for people who don't know me. It is a rare and blessed mood that finds me choosing to love the random people I pass on the street. It is an equally rare and blessed mood that finds me choosing to love my enemies.
What lies at the heart of this problem, for me at least, is a dysfunctional understanding of love. I often unconsciously fall into the trap of dispatching love in a calculated way, "indirect egotism," in the words of Fr. Robert Barron: "I treat you well so that you will treat me well in return." When I dispatch love like a general dispatches troops, this is not love at all. Clearly, I need a higher understanding of love.
I think that this higher understanding can be illustrated by a simple equation:
LOVE = ATTENTION
This is the ideal to strive for: the object of my attention must be the object of my love. If I am looking at you, talking to you, thinking about you, or anything else, I must also be loving you.
This is what Christ did: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said..." (Mk 10:21a). Jesus loved perfectly. Yes, sometimes he was stern—like when he healed a man on the Sabbath whose hand was withered, and looked at his critics "with anger," "grieved at their hardness of heart" (see Mk 3:1-6). But even such a reaction, human as it was, was motivated by care, and charged through and through with love. He wanted better for them. Search the Gospels and find me a passage where Jesus acts out of pettiness or hatred. You won't find one. He was like us in all things except sin.
Inspirational author Phil Bosmans put it well when he said that we "shouldn't weigh out our love like a grocer." I am called by my God to love fully, truly, wholeheartedly. That means working toward making the object of my attention the object of my love. This is my ideal to strive for, demonstrated so wonderfully by Love Himself.
Attentively (wink wink!),
Joezilla
2 comments:
Great post, Joe. I missed this one last week. The biggest help for me in trying to love enemies comes from Ephesians 6:12. As our culture moves further from God even the inclination to resist the influence of the evil one diminishes and the task of loving enemies becomes more difficult. Keep blogging!
Hey, thanks for the post! Honestly, I was totally forgetting about the influence of the enemy on our ability to love. But of course that's a huge part of the challenge. I once read an interview with a priest who said his goal is to be such a force for good that when he wakes up each day, the devil says, "Damn, he's up!" I love your connection between spiritual warfare and the active work of loving other people. Thanks for the post...and the exhortation. It's good to know people are reading this! =)
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