John 14:15-21
Learning to Love Back
James Sledge May
17, 2020
For
those who’ve never read her, Lamott is a novelist who may be better known for
her bestselling writings on faith. These contain a mixture of her often strange
personal story, wry wit and humor, and sometimes irreverent thoughts on how faith
has helped her navigate it all.
With
a little effort I found the quote I had recalled in one of her books. She was
discussing her then fourteen year-old son, Sam, and the struggles of raising a
teenager as a single mom who is a recovering addict. She spoke of Sam’s
religious sensibilities, how he believes that Jesus is true, how he prays, even
prays with his mom at bedtime on occasions. But he hates church, even the
quirky little Presbyterian congregation Lamott belongs to. She writes:
Then why do I
make him go? Because I want him to. We live in bewildering, drastic times, and
a little spiritual guidance never killed anyone. I think it’s a fair compromise
that every other week he has to come to the place that has been the tap for me:
I want him to see the people who loved me when I felt most unlovable, who have
loved him since I first told them that I was pregnant, even though he might not
want to be with them. I want him to see their faces. He gets the most valuable
things I know through osmosis.
Also, he has no
job, no car, no income. He needs to stay in my good graces.
While he lives in my house, he
has to do things my way. And there are worse things for kids than to have to
spend time with people who love God. Teenagers who do not go to church are
adored by God, but they don’t get to meet people who love God back. Learning to
love back is the hardest part of being alive.[1]
I
think she’s right. We’re all born needing to be loved. The desire for it is
innate. Infants and young children who do not receive love struggle to thrive.
But we are not born knowing how to love in return, to love back, and many of us
never learn to do it all that well. The world is full of people who always take
a lot more love than they give. Countless marriages and relationships fall
apart because the balance of giving and receiving love gets so badly out of
whack, because so many of us have not learned well that hardest part of being
alive.
There’s
a reason that the Bible has numerous commands to love, to love God, to love neighbor,
to love one another, because that’s the part we struggle with. This love that
the Bible commands is not a feeling, not an emotion. The word used in the
gospel is not used of romantic love, and in the New Testament, this love is
epitomized by the life of Jesus. It is the love of God for the world, even
though the world resists God and opposes God’s way.
God
apparently has no trouble loving humanity, no matter how badly off course we
get. But we struggle. Jesus tells us to love our enemies because that is what
God’s love looks like, what Christ-like love is. God so loves the world, so
loves us, that Jesus takes on flesh, becomes fully human, even risks the cross
and the grave. And for us to be fully in relationship with Jesus, for us to
discover our true humanity, we must learn that hardest part of being alive; we
must learn to love back.
That
is why Jesus weaves together love, keeping his commandments, and intimate
relationship with him and with the Father. Real relationship requires, demands,
learning to love back. It isn’t that God will love us if we follow the rules. God already loves us. But
relationship, the sort of mystical communion Jesus speaks of in our gospel,
does not happen without us responding to that love. But even here, God does the
heavy lifting, sending the Holy Spirit to help us, to empower us and show us the
way.
All
this has me doing some existential thinking about the nature of faith, about
the nature of church, about the nature of humanity when it is what it is meant
to be. Christianity often messes this up terribly. We turn faith into knowing
and believing the correct things. We make salvation about getting your ticket
to heaven. We plug faith into the crazy, consumerist idea that human life is
about acquiring more and more, and sometimes we turn church into the spiritual
equivalent of a shopping mall. But none of that sounds the slightest bit like
anything Jesus ever said.
Jesus
calls us into the same mystical, intimate relationship with the divine that he
knows, but he insists that this is inseparable from and intrinsically linked to
the radical love of others. Or as my favorite seminary professor used to say, Jesus
and the entire Christian enterprise are about creating “true communion with God
in true community with others.” And true community is not just a group of
people. It is a gathering where people love one another in the very same way
that Jesus loves.
Doing community well has been
challenging of late, with stay-at-home, social distancing, and fears of
COVID-19. But we are still trying to care for one another, still trying to help
our neighbors in need. We are looking for creative new ways to come together to
talk and pray and be there for each other, because we cannot be fully human,
cannot be the church, cannot have a deep spiritual connection to the divine,
without loving one another, without learning to love back.
_______________________________________________________________
In
a book she penned six years prior to the one I quoted earlier, Anne Lamott had
also discussed why she made her son, then in elementary school, go to church.
I make him
because I can. I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds.
But that is only
part of it. The main reason is that I
want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little
light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to
say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of
spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith;
they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians—people banding together to work on
themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of
their own candle; they are part of something beautiful. I saw something from
the Jewish Theological Seminary that said, “A human life is like a single
letter of the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be a part of a great
meaning." Our funky little church is filled with people who are working
for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and
they are home writing letters, and they are in shelters with giant platters of
food.
When I was at the end of my rope,
the people at St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The
church became my home in the old meaning of home—that
it’s where, when you show up, they have to let you in. They let me in. They
even said, “You come back now.”[2]
O
God, help us to be that sort of home, to be true community, to love back—even
if, for the moment, mostly virtually—for the sake of a broken and hurting
world.
No comments:
Post a Comment