The Slow Way Newsletter: To Know is to Love
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
- Colossians 3:3
"Oh beauty ever ancient, ever new . . . you were within and I was outside myself."
- St Augustine
To Know is to Love
This week our podcast focused on my youngest son, Ace's journey, a year and a half into his autism diagnosis. We talked about ASD, Autism Acceptance Month, and I shared that my dream for my son is simply that he might be known and that he might fully know others, because to know is to love. Ace is beginning to show us that he grasps what we're saying to him. When I tell him to come join the family in the dining room and he follows us to the table, or when I explain that I'm leaving for a work trip and he frowns and hugs me, that's receptive language, and it's been hard-won. I have learned so much from the delicate pace of Ace's development, and when it comes to communication each step has been slowed down and pulled apart into strands. Receptive communication, it turns out, always comes before speech. A child first needs to understand language before he can form it for himself.
Knowing and loving are that way too. We can't fully love another human being until we know that human being. First comes knowing, then comes loving. Which also means that to know fully is to love.
To be people who live into the great calling of Jesus to love God and love our neighbor, we have to be serious about knowing God and knowing our neighbor. To know is to listen. Until we're willing to listen to and learn the stories of our neighbors we won't be able to love them. And until we learn how to listen to the Spirit of God, we cannot be our realest, truest selves.
Augustine calls God "Beauty ever ancient, ever new."
I love what Augustine has to say about where God is. "You were within and I was outside myself." It's a reversal of how we often see ourselves, as if we are separated an eternal distance from the presence of God. As if the spiritual work of knowing God is to somehow overcome the space between our self and the divine. But, according to St. Augustine, if we are looking outside ourselves for God's Spirit, we're looking in the wrong places. We're looking to find God in the shallow spaces of pretense and performance, of correct theology, and acceptable doctrine. And all the while God is already and always within, inside what Richard Rohr has called, the "Really Real." God is already in the spaces we are most afraid to walk into -- especially the spaces within ourselves.
And if we want to know our neighbors, we have to start there too. In the Really Real. If we want to love the marginalized, the oppressed, the ones Jesus says will inherit the earth, we have to listen and learn so that we can know, and eventually love.
As my friend Heather says to her kids: Be a listener, be a learner.
First we learn to be people who practice curiosity and humility when it comes to one another's stories. That's how we settle into the posture of love. I'm convinced that when we stop assuming we have the answers, when we as a collective come to each other ready to listen and learn, that's when healing will take place. That's when we learn to love our neighbor, because first we have learned to know them.
And that's when we begin to realize that God wasn't out there waiting to be discovered if we hustled hard enough. "Oh Beauty, ever ancient, ever new -- You were within. I was outside myself." God was already here, in the Really Real. We are the ones coming home.
Are we listening and learning to happen upon God in the places of Truth, in the places of suffering, of abuse, of neglect, of hunger, of rage, of division, of separation, of racial divides? Are we listening and learning from God who is already here? In the pain of this world, and in the suffering and truth of our own selves?
a slow practice
Draw a picture of yourself. If you're like me your drawing may not be much more than a stick figure. (Let it go, lean in. Drawing time will be over soon.) In the chest of your drawing's body, similar to the image in the chest/gut of the Our Lady of Ferguson icon above, write Richard Rohr's words "The Really Real."
You can continue this practice by drawing, or you can go to list making. Whatever works best for you. If you're making a list you can title it "What I Show the World" (You can also draw these things outside the body of your person.) List the pretenses you put on, starting with what comes to mind first. Then go deeper. What are the personality traits do you hide behind? What do you project to strangers? What do you project to the people who know you best? What do strangers experience when they're with you? What kind of words do you use when you talk about your faith? Why do you choose those words? Are there ways you hide what is truest about you in order to protect yourself?
What is the phrase "The Really Real" mean to you? What do you see as being the truest things about you in your core? Draw those things or list them. Where does the Really Real lead you? Is this a hopeful place, a scary place? A place of peace? A place you don't recognize?
Ask the Spirit to show you where God is in the Really Real of your own body/mind/soul.
Pray out loud: "Oh Beauty, ever ancient, ever new -- You were within and I was outside myself. Teach need to see the truest parts of me and my neighbors, they Really Real of us hidden with Christ in God."