Jesus reaches for this command when he is asked for the greatest commandment, linking it with another Old Testament command to love neighbor as self. Linked together, these two speak of life animated by the Divine Other and by the human other. Quite a contrast to life organized around my wants and needs. But how on earth to move from the self-centered life to the other-centered life?
Today's meditation by Richard Rohr includes this. "The mystics’ overwhelming experience is this full-body blow of the Divine loving them, God radically accepting them. And they spend the rest of their life trying to verbalize that experience, and invariably finding ways to give that love back through forms of service, compassion and non-stop worship. But none of this is to earn God’s love; it’s always and only to return God’s love. Love is repaid by love alone."
The full-body blow of Divine love; now that's a phrase. And it speaks of an experience not easily transmitted by the methods of "Christian Education" I encountered growing up in the church. That is not to dismiss those as meaningless, but for all the information they imparted, they were modeled on the schoolhouse. And they did not speak the language of relationship or love.
This strikes me as the big challenge facing the church and congregations. How do we provide the necessary information about God that is needed to distinguish those experiences that are of God from those that are not? And how do we help people be open to the experience of God that gives real meaning to their information about God? And while traditions like my own Presbyterian Church have historically done a very good job on the informational side, we seem to struggle on both counts now. We struggle with "Christian Education" even as we make sporadic attempts to do "Spiritual Formation."
To be sure, I have no magic solutions to offer. We seem to be in a time when the old is breaking down, but the new that will replace it is as yet very unclear. It is an exciting time with much experimentation going on. And it is a frightening time of dislocation where many hunker down with what they already know. But both the experimentation and the hunkering down can be, and often are, very self serving, without the Other-centered focused called for by Deuteronomy and Jesus.
Perhaps a good lenten discipline for many congregations would be to spend time reflecting on our focus. What is it that gives us meaning and purpose as a congregation? What is the "North star" that guides all that we do, and is it about the Other. This moves us into the language of "call." Call is always about an other, and it always draws us away from ourselves toward something else. But that makes call inherently frightening. Many people correctly intuit that a call in one direction by necessity eliminates a number of other directions, and many of us are loathe to narrow our options.
Speaking of focus, I feel very much that I am wandering around in this post, with no clear idea where I am headed. In that sense, these words mirror some of my worries for the church. Can we encounter the love of The Other and hear the call of that Other that pulls us away from ourselves and sets us out on the path we are meant for? Can our congregations hear a call that guides us clearly so that we began to realize where we are going, and also where we are not?
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