The Slow Way Newsletter: Your Definition of Love is Good and True
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Your Definition of Love is Good and True
I wrote this past week on Instagram about a sermon I heard over the Christmas holidays that rubbed me the wrong way. It was a sermon about love, which wanted to point to the sacrificial love of Christ as the ultimate way a human can know and experience love.
Here’s why that sermon didn’t settle right in my spirit: In order to point to Divine Love as ultimate, the preacher felt the need to dismiss every other human notion of love. He dismissed the idea of love as a universal force in the cosmos, or as a personal feeling.
That set up, that bait and switch that I’ve experienced so often in the Christian Church, particularly the North American Evangelical Christian Church. That “Hey, you think you understand the world and your own experience, but Surprise! You’re wrong,” teaches us that we humans can’t trust ourselves, and that our experience of the world and each other is a lie. When pastors teach that there is one way to understand life and faith and love and that is the way of *insert biblical idea here* it troubles me. When our spiritual teachers tell us that our experience of the world and its beauty, goodness, or even our desires, is not to be trusted, but their particular reading of a particular passage of scripture is to be trusted, we learn to dismiss our soul-knowledge. We learn to dismiss the manifestation of the love our parents showed us as babies, or didn’t show us. We learn to dismiss the good and holy and human desires we hold. We learn to dismiss anyone who doesn’t read the Bible our way or hold the *correct* beliefs as incapable of love. And that divides us. It leads to less love in the world. And in that sense, it is anti-God.
Love is a tricky word, overused and undersold in our culture. But I insist that we know what it is. I insist that the word we call “sin” is actually our falling short of love, which all of us know in our guts is the break-down of humanity. And I insist that it is the force of our being, and the healing of our world is love. As Martin Luther King, Jr, who we celebrated this past week, so famously said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
That love is a transcendent force of the universe and I believe we can and should call that Love, God. And so does the entire New Testament book of 1 John. One of the great failures of the American Church is the way we have segregated ourselves from the rest of the culture. The way so many Christian Americans believe they have the monopoly on truth and love, mostly because they assume the rest of the world has it wrong, that anyone who is “other” can’t love or understand love, or even experience the love of God outside of “correct belief.”
This feels like tricky territory, like I’m stepping on theological landmines, so let me say it this way. When my son Ace (who has both Down syndrome and autism) was born, and as he’s grown and I’ve learned to not only accept his challenges and differences, but also embrace his intellectual disability as a beautiful way to be human, I’ve learned to unravel so much of what I carried around my shoulders when it came to God and faith and meaning. The more I’ve fallen in love with my son, who does not need to prove himself valuable to me through performance, success, or (let’s bold this and capitalize it) BELIEVING THE CORRECT THINGS ABOUT GOD, the more I’ve recognized that none of us can possibly prove ourselves good enough through our performance, success or correct belief. That’s why love exists in the first place. And, Love itself is what makes us human. To be human is not to be able to walk or talk or process high levels of information. To be human is not to have two legs or two arms or ten toes. To be human is not even to be able to make eye contact or interact with the world around us. But to be human is to love and receive love, which is available to every person, disabled or non-disabled. Christian or Buddhist or None.
That’s what I’m trying to say. Love is all of it. Love is the force we call God. Love is the feeling. Love is the action between two old friends, and the generosity between you and your waiter at lunch today. And in that broad definition, I think those of us who call ourselves Christian can step toward theology: not the kind that draws lines of who’s in and who’s out, of who gets it and who obviously doesn’t, but to lean toward a theology of God as Love that is moving toward all of us, calling each of us to come close, to experience a Love that transforms everything, and ultimately teaches us what to do with the feelings in our chest: how to turn the feeling of love into a way of living that transforms our relationships, visions of ourselves, and our small worlds.
a slow practice
Can we go back for a moment to the things I said about Ace? How my journey of moving toward the spiritual practice of slowness has taught me how to unravel the burden of performance when it came to God and faith and correct belief? How, the more I’ve fallen in love with my son, who does not need to prove himself valuable to earn my love, the more I’ve come to the relieving conclusion that I don’t need prove myself in order to be welcomed by God. I am loved and held and received just by being myself.
Can you take a moment today to ask yourself what burdens you carry when it comes to proving yourself valuable or lovable or acceptable to God?
Let’s take a deep breath together.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
I’d like for you to imagine yourself as God sees you. Maybe you think in metaphors like I do, and it helps you to imagine God experiencing you as something else: a beloved puppy, or an heirloom of significance, or as a piece of music or art. How would you like God to experience you?
Now, as you think of that item or thing or piece of art, whether its your pet or your plant or your great grandfather’s favorite book passed down to you, what expectation do you have of that *thing*? Are you asking it to perform for you? Are you asking it to do something remarkable to earn your care or affection?
Can you sit for a moment with the idea that God might love you as you are, especially as you are, simply because of your existence? Your very existence is good and just as your family heirloom doesn’t need to do a backflip to be significant, you do not need to prove yourself to be enough to earn love.
Love is free and available to you. If you have time right now or later, pull out your journal. Can you take some time to listen to the Spirit of God, to list out who you actually are, without trying, without “growing,” without meeting your New Year’s resolutions to do better. Who are you?
And then, beside that list that describes your personality, your tendencies, your strengths and your weaknesses, I invite you to write a comma beside that description. And then the words: “and God loves this part of me.”
What does this mean for you? How might this change how you see yourself and your experience of love in the world?
Take some time to be still and silent.