Pondering Love

I trust that your preparations for Christmas have gone well. In fact, it would please me greatly if this article becomes part of that preparation.

The four traditional words for Advent are hope, peace, joy, and love. I have been considering each word in succession at Cross~Wind.

I want to share just a bit around the theme of love. We sing songs about it. Many think of it largely as romance. Yet, when we think of love coming down at Christmas, we are thinking of something quite different.

If we step back for a moment, and remember that the original language of our New Testament is Greek, we might receive some help. “Love” has several Greek words that have differing nuances. The most obvious is that one of the words refers to the affection we might find between friends. However, I want to focus on agape, which refers to a conscious evaluation and choice that result in concern and interest in the other. It suggests sincere appreciation and high regard for the other.

Can you name a time that you experienced undeserved love?

            Think of it this way. To love, agape, is to begin reflecting upon our moral relationship to the other. Love embraces the other. Love means that something matters, moving against our nagging suspicion that nothing matters. In fact, a moral sickness or malady is to move toward apathy and isolation. Love heals that sickness. It suggests knowledge of the other. It helps the other. Love points the way toward that which we hope. Love is joyful acceptance of the other. To love is to suggest that what is truly valuable is beyond or outside me. To love is to move beyond what the law requires. We become loving people. Our capacity to love is the affirmation of our own life, happiness, growth, and freedom. The Old Testament Law found its reaffirmation in the second of the two great commandments Jesus identified: Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus defined this love in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29ff. Such love involves caring and thoughtful action toward the other; not just warm feelings you may or may not have toward the other.

            Let us apply such reflections to the Christmas story. How much love did Mary and Joseph display?

Carlo Carretto tells of visiting a village among the Arab people.  It was not long until he became acquainted with the Tuaregs, who lived in tents along a rocky basin where water surfaced.  A girl in the camp where he stayed had been betrothed to a boy in another camp.  She had not gone to live with him because he was too young.  Joseph, he remembered, was betrothed to Mary, but they were not living together.  Two years later, he came back to the camp.  During conversation around the campfire, he asked if the marriage had taken place yet.  There was awkward silence.  He did not pursue the subject.  Later, he asked a friend from the camp what the silence meant.  He looked cautiously around.  Because he trusted Carlo Carretto as a man of God, he made a sign, passing his hand under his chin.  It meant that she had her throat cut.  The reason?  Before, the wedding it was discovered that the girl was pregnant.  In what sociologists call an honor and shame culture, she betrayed her family. It required her sacrifice. For Carlo Carretto, a shiver went through him as he thought of a girl being killed because she had not been faithful to her future husband (Blessed are you who Believed).

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out of love, and to let it come in. When we love, we are in tune with, for God is love. Love binds Father, Son, and Spirit, with the Spirit inviting us to participate in this love. Prayer is an expression of love to God and neighbor. Yes, God loves this world, and we join God in that love.

We in the church have this wonderful opportunity to share the love God has for this world. The hearts of people will never be as open as they are now.

Praying for Joy

           

Today, I want you to consider your deepest prayer related to joy for this Christmas. Why is joy important in your life?

            Joy is the name of a person. Almond Joy is the name of a candy bar. “Joy” is a movie, a very nice one, I might add. You have heard the sayings. Joy is an inside job. Choose joy every day. I choose joy.

          Mary (Luke 1) said that she rejoices because of what we celebrate during Advent.

          This season seems to focus on that … or does it? Is there a difference between rejoicing, having joy, and the forced seasonal happiness so many expect us to have during this time of year? Too many people experience too stark of a contrast between their lives at this season and the rest of the year. Yet, if we are in touch with the joy that Mary had, a joy received from God, it can restore to us a sense of wholeness and community.

I am not a person who tends to display to others the things that give me joy. Yet, joy may not always show itself in smiles and laughter. It at least suggests the things in which you have inner happiness and delight. Such joy is not simply on the surface. Therefore, that in which we have joy reveals the things that matter to us.  One way to reflect prayerfully upon your spiritual gift or your gifts and graces for ministry is to consider the things that give you your deepest joy. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10). That in which you have joy does strengthen you for the journey of life. Joy reveals your life aim. When we have joy, we know something better exists. Joy can surprise us. Something outside us has stimulated our inner joy. It will unleash our imagination and stimulate us to consider new possibilities. Joy unites us to the world and people around us. What we say with our lives is what gives our lives its meaning. Now is the time to have joy for the time we have and the people who have made it meaningful and joyful. We repeatedly know the original joy in life, joy in the richness, breadth, and beauty of creation and in each new day, joy in the illuminations of the life of the spirit, power from action within the order of community life, and a turning to others and participation in their joys and sorrows.[1]

          Note how Mary's song, the Magnificat, highlights various contrasts.  – that in opposition to brokenness, wrongs, sorrows and sighs, God will prevail, and one day all shall be well. We could also list many wrongs. In naming what is wrong, we can give it power over us. The more we focus on the wrongs, the more power we give them, for they seem even larger than they are. We must not forget what is right. We need to look for places where the reign of God is evident in our personal lives, in our community, and in the world. As you praise God, you will draw strength knowing that no matter the issue, joy truly “comes with the morning” (Psalm 30).

Karl Barth suggests that when Mary magnifies the Lord and rejoices in God, it is part of the notion of the beauty of the Lord attracting people to do so. God, who stoops down to humanity whose heart is “wicked,” becomes an object of desire, joy, pleasure, yearning and enjoyment. In a sense, the desperate condition of humanity is confuted and overcome by the fact that God must be the object of joy. To speak of the beauty of the Lord in this way is to speak of divine glory. When we speak of the beauty of the Lord, we are explaining divine glory. It is to say how God enlightens, convinces, and persuades us. It describes the shape that the revelation of God takes place. God has this superior force, the power of attraction, which speaks for itself, which wins and conquers, in the fact that God is beautiful.[2]

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[1] The Greek word for joy refers to having joy in something, having gladness and great happiness as well as the reason for it. It refers to inner happiness and delight. Joy is not a surface-level happy – it is deeply seated in one’s character. Joy may not always manifest itself in smiles and laughter, but rather in grace and assurance. Joy might be described as knowing something better exists, and holding onto that which is better. Joy surprises us. We contemplate something true, good, and beautiful and it brings enjoyment. We savor the experience, for to analyze it would be to stifle it. It would be difficult to think of something giving you joy as also something practical and useful. What brings joy is more than that. Most often, joy is something we share with another. That in which you have joy reveals your life aim. Something outside us stimulates us, but joy brings it within us. The orientation of a human life is toward what brings fullness of life. That which you love, in which you have joy, and in which  you hope, reveal that orientation. Feelings like this unleash our imagination and stimulate us to consider new possibilities. Such feelings unite us to the world and to the people around us. Negative feeling tends to isolate us from the world and from others. The choice of living life authentically and in freedom leads to genuine joy. Life is on loan, a loan that has a beginning and an end. We must take the loan seriously and joyfully. We need to receive the gift of life joyfully. Without the beginning and end, our lives would not be a story.

[2] (Church Dogmatics, II.1, [31])

Narrating a Life

“A Matter of Identity” is the story of William Thompson who cannot recognize anyone, but he can create fictional characters on the spot. He desperately seeks to make his world feel normal. The story occurs in a book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970, 1985), by Oliver Sachs. It occurs under his account of excesses of the brain. Tragically, William has an excess of amnesia. We may forget where we put the keys. William has no recent memory, so he must connect what he experiences now with the remote past. If you have seen the movie Fifty First Dates (2004), you have an image of what this might be like.

Dr. Sacks walks into a room to meet with William. When William sees Sacks, he identifies him first as a customer in the deli William used to operate, then as an old friend, then as Hymie the butcher next door, and finally as a doctor. The progression from one identity to the next is rapid fire, but the result is that William becomes scared at his inability to correctly identify who he is with and where he is. As soon as correct recognition begins to take hold, William begins the series all over again, assuming once more that Sacks is a customer in his deli. William suffers from Korsakov's Psychosis, but does not realize it. He dances from one confabulation to the next with the ability to make those around him believe he is perfectly normal. He seems to have an anxiety within him that results in making every effort to make the world around him feel normal to him. He does it by making up identities and stories of the people with him. Due to the way he could quickly and without hesitation identify a real person in his world, his brother, but without distinguishing the real person from the fantasies he had developed, Sachs describes it as “equalization,” the process of depriving of any meaning the real things in your world. William possessed an incredible charisma and an irresistible ability to tell stories, but also has a severe case of amnesia. He cannot remember the conversations he has had in the past few minutes. Think of it. He must continually create a world and self to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such frenzy calls forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy. He became a confabulatory genius. He must make himself and his world every moment.

The account reminds me of how important memory is to our identity or our sense of who we are. Of course, we forget things and may not have a good recollection of some events or people in our lives. Some of that may be a good thing. Yet, our ability to connect the various elements of our lives into a story requires something as simple as memory. We take it for granted, until we lose it, or someone we love loses it.

For Sachs, here is the problem William faces.

"If we wish to know about a man, we ask, 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?-for each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us-through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations....To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy-hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.(110-111)"

Given the disease that afflicts William, I would suggest that Sachs has correctly identified the problem William faces.

Yet, I would also offer that Sachs has not correctly defined the problem that Sachs himself faces in being confronted with William. I say this because of his encounter with Jimmy G, another Korsakoff’s patient that he describes in “The Lost Mariner.” He says that he keeps wondering about a lost soul. He wanted to establish some continuity and roots in someone who had roots only in the remote past (29). He wonders if Jimmy G had been “de-souled” by the disease. If what gives humanity “soul” was only our individual ability to make our lives into a story, then the inability to do so raises this question.

To be clear, I hope that if you no longer have that ability to tell your story, other people will discover ways of helping you become a meaningful part of the story of their lives.

Such reflections lead me to consider a different way of looking at the notion of lost soul and de-souled. Maybe “soul” is not simply an individual matter. To use the example of William, we might consider defining such abnormalities in individuals in a way that does not isolate the individual from a much larger story of which their lives are only a part.  People like William say much about our souls, if you will. They raise the question of our humanity and respect toward another, regardless of the disease they face. For that reason, William may well be a lost soul, but we find our souls when we treat such persons with respect and dignity.

I do not think the story of William is not just his story. When you meet him, his story has become part of your story.

We see a ray of light in the life of William in that he does find a few moments of peace, which Sachs describes with great respect and generosity of spirit.  

"Our efforts to 're-connect' William fail...[b]ut when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there in his quietness he recovers his own quiet...the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax to subside;(110)"

If you are interested in the formation of human identity and how human beings make sense of their lives, you will likely find the case studies Sachs offers of interest. It reminds me that human identity is always open-ended. We are always in the process of forming our identity, which is why human beings are so open to change through their experiences with others. We struggle with identity because “we are not yet what we shall be,” as I John 3:2 puts it.

Sachs wants to place the human subject back at the center of scientific endeavor. My caution in such a project is this. You do not get to simply narrate your world and give it meaning. You cannot discover the significance of your life by remaining within yourself. Your life has meaning as you move outside yourself, so to speak, and engage with others. You have a responsibility to tell a story with your life as it intersects with the stories of other people.

Come to think of it, maybe humanity itself is not simply narrating its story. Maybe God has a story of humanity as formed in the image of God, and now, with the coming of Christ, is forming us into the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). In that sense, the image of God is still on the way and forming in us. Human misery is deep, we fall back from the purposes God has for us, and we fall short of what God intended. We are separated from self, from others, and from God.

Healing the various forms of separation and alienation is what the coming of Jesus Christ into our world means. Actually, we may gain our true identity in recognizing that this is the world God has made, and therefore, we discover our identity as we discover our place in that story.

By the way, such a theme might even be a significant aspect of the message of the Advent and Christmas season.