Is love difficult? It depends on how you understand it. St. Paul’s understanding of love in his first letters to the Corinthians describes what love is in the Christian tradition. If I may rephrase his famous words on love and change them into a question form, we can ask ourselves as follows:
“Can I be patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude to others? Can I stop insisting on my own way and listen to others? Can I be mindful of any resentment to others and start the process of reconciliation and forgiveness? Can I think and behave conscientiously and rejoice in others’ success and joy?” Can you? You certainly can! At times, we might want to be rude and mean to certain people in certain situations, but it doesn’t mean we are losing our ability to love. It’s never about whether we can or not but whether we want to or not. In this matter of wanting or desiring to love others, there are two forces: restraining forces and driving forces. We want to have stronger driving forces than restraining forces. What would be the most effective way to increase our driving forces to love? Should we push ourselves harder, for example, by commanding ourselves the messages of ought-to, should, and must as conveyed in today’s lesson from Leviticus? I’m not sure how this “should” language can actually change us to love better and more if not triggering guilt or shame at worst when we fail to do so. There’s an easier way to increase our driving forces to love others. That is to reduce restraining forces. The less obstacles there are, the smoother things move along. See what’s in the way and set it aside gently. There are two major restraining forces that get in our way of loving others: fear and apathy or indifference. Fear of the Other creates hatred. We hate what we fear. When we think of the word “phobia,” hatred might come up immediately. Interestingly, the term originated from Phobos who is the god of fear and panic in Greek mythology. Fear, not hatred, is the opposite of love. Hatred may be our self-protective emotional reaction to what we fear, and this fear of the Other is what we fear within ourselves. We are afraid of it because we might be “it” so that we show aggression to it as if the more we hate it, the further we get away from it. But the reality is that the more one thinks of it, the more one becomes attached to it. This is why embracing works better than excluding, which is God’s way of redeeming. The other restraining force to love is apathy or indifference. I see this more as a spiritual condition of acedia, more known as sloth, (one of the seven capital sins in the Christian tradition). It’s a lack of wanting to do anything, one’s passion extinguished. Nothing interests that person in this state. His mind wanders around, never being grounded in his present reality. In this state, he does not and thus cannot pay attention to others, being consumed by himself that is never satisfied with anything in his life. He’s apathetic and indifferent to things and people around him. If the former restraining force of fear of the Other is the condition in which one is too protective of oneself, the latter restraining force of acedia is the condition in which one is too consumed of oneself to the point self is depleted. The common denominator of these two restraining forces is the self. The self gets in the way of loving others. Then, what can be the remedy for this spiritual malaise? I think we can find it in the most crucial teaching of loving others as oneself. The key is in loving “oneself.” Once we know what it’s like to love oneself, then it’s not too hard to love others. How do we then love ourselves? We can consider self-care, self-compassion, etc. Self-compassion in particular is much needed when one is caught up in self-hatred. Yet, this doesn’t include others. It only deals with oneself. I want to suggest something more radical, that the true art of loving oneself happens when one becomes self-less, forgetting oneself to reach out to others. One cannot truly love oneself apart from loving others. These two acts of loving others and loving oneself simultaneously take place. Self-less love is possible when we forget ourselves and give undivided attention to others. In doing so, one becomes patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude to others. It’s like when you are deeply in love with someone, you forget yourself and become solely attentive to that person. As you lose yourself, you’re fulfilled with love in union with the beloved. It’s self-less but in reality is self-fulfilled and expanded by others. The more we empty ourselves, the deeper and wider we are filled with others. The more we empty ourselves, the fuller God fills ourselves with God’s loving presence. Jesus is our example, role model, sign, sacrament for the divine selfless love. He shows the art of losing himself and emptying himself to love others, in which he becomes one with God. It is paradoxical that when he lets go of himself completely, he is eternally filled with God and others. In a way, it may be confusion or a lie that we have to protect ourselves out of fear of the Other and that we can find meanings in our lives if we are only consumed with ourselves. The former takes us to hatred while the latter extinguishes all our desires to do anything. So, as Christians we look at the cross. It’s the symbol that reminds us to lose ourselves, let go of ourselves out of trust in God’s unconditional love and mercy as we see the resurrected Christ. This is the way of liberation and freedom of selves. This is the way of love and holiness. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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