Herein is Love Part 4

Loving is an art, and we all need to learn the art and to refine its practice. One would expect Christians and church people, who are supposed to be incarnations of the spirit of love, to be masters of the art. Yet, to the world, we often appear to be ungracious people. So let us learn to love one another, and let us train our children in the practice of the art of love, by encouraging and disciplining them in it.

If a text for this responsibility were needed, we might take it from the ancient liturgical language of the church in which we say, "We receive this person into the congregation of Christ's flock," which should mean that we receive the person into the congregation of persons in whom the love of Christ is incarnate.

_The Language of Words and Life_

Unfortunately, however, we often use the words that suggest the right meaning but fail to carry out that meaning in our lives. All too easily our religious statements become empty forms, separated from the vitality and meaning which they are supposed to express. Remember, for instance, how vainly we sometimes say the Lord's Prayer, which is a form that our Lord gave us, by means of which we could express the vitality of our relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d and one another. Likewise, we can honor and use the correct verbal and other symbols about the church and Christian fellows.h.i.+p, its rites and ceremonies, and yet fail to translate them into action, with the result that our rites and ceremonies and doctrinal statements become dry, empty forms. Instead of being the means of new life, they may only disappoint people, because they do not really communicate the meaning that they seem to promise. Every church should always test whether its forms are really expressive of the truth which it professes. It is not enough that we speak the truth; we must live it.

It has been given to men to communicate both by word and by the life that is lived. There must always be a vital relation between the meaning that is being communicated in the word and the form or means of its communication. The breakdown of education and of religion occurs when there is a breakdown between the human experience with its meaning and the word which represents it. This breakdown is complete when speaking the word becomes a subst.i.tute for living its meaning. This breakdown also occurs when a culture undertakes to educate by means of words and concepts only, and neglects to employ what happens between man and man as an integral and indispensable part of the curriculum.

The word and the meaning of the experience belong to each other and need each other, and the relation between them is a necessary part of education. Let us use the word "fight" as an ill.u.s.tration. We have this word because of man's experience in fighting. Out of the relations.h.i.+ps of conflict and combat comes the experience we think of as fighting, and the word "fight" stands for it. The very young child learns to fight before he learns the word "fight." So far as he knows, the experience of fighting exists only between himself and his mother, and it is necessary for him to discover that fighting is a universal human activity. He learns the meaning of the word "fight" by the meanings that he brings out of his own combat, and on the basis of these he begins to understand the universal meaning of "fight." The word thus unites his little, individual experience with the experience of the human race of which he is a part. Therefore the word becomes an effective instrument in teaching him the meaning of his experience in the context of the experience of his own kind.

Similarly, because of his relations.h.i.+p to his mother, the child may experience her trustworthiness long before he knows the word "trust,"

but he needs a word for this experience. Then, as he begins to acquire the ability to convey these meanings with words, he learns the word "trust" and immediately the door opens so that his experience becomes related to the much larger experience of the people that have lived before him. If a child is being brought up in the Christian fellows.h.i.+p, the minute he begins to have a word to describe the trustworthiness of his relations.h.i.+p with his mother, he also begins to understand the meaning of trust as Christians have experienced it in relation to G.o.d.

On the other hand, it is difficult to convey the meaning of Christ's death to a child. Here the words are crucial to the understanding of the meaning, but he cannot bring out of his own life sufficient experiences to make the meaning of the concept available to him. But it is important to introduce him to these concepts by means of words against the time when the words will carry meaning. As we live with our children we help them interpret the meaning of their experiences. Some day they will be able to move from the little meanings that they have acc.u.mulated about life and death to the great meanings of the life and death and resurrection of Christ by means of the little word "cross" and other a.s.sociated words. Education requires the use of both the language of words _and_ the language of relations.h.i.+ps. We teach children the words of our faith, but at the same time we try to live with them in ways that will provide the meanings that will prepare them for understanding the meanings of the faith. And this is what I mean when I suggest that what happens between us is an indispensable part of the curriculum.

_The Curriculum of Relations.h.i.+p_

This emphasis upon the relations.h.i.+p between parent and child, between teacher and pupil, between person and person, as a part of the learning situation, seems to put a heavy burden upon the teacher. After all, it was difficult enough when the teacher had to be responsible for the correct words for the transmission of the truth, and for the understandings that must go with them. Now, in addition, we have to pay attention to what is going on between teacher and pupil. The work of teaching is much bigger than mere verbal transmission, and nothing less is worthy of being called Christian teaching.

This kind of teaching requires that the truth being taught be incarnate in the relations.h.i.+p between men, which was what G.o.d did in Christ. The teaching of Christ is contained not only in His words, but also in His life. His life gave meaning to His words and made them uniquely different from any other words that had ever been spoken. Actually, many of the things that our Lord taught were not new, but His life was, and this made His teaching unique. The same principle must apply to us. Some instruction given in the name of Christian education is dull, monotonous, and irrelevant. There is nothing untrue about it, but it is taught without the conviction born of experience, and it is not expressed in what goes on between man and man. On the other hand, a recognition of the responsibilities of this kind of teaching should be coupled with the joys and satisfactions of it. It is the kind of teaching that can relieve us of some of the anxieties of accomplishment.

_A Word of Encouragement_

Many parents and teachers are concerned about the quality of the care and teaching which they give children, and they are particularly worried about their failures and sins in relation to them. Present in many of us is the fear that we may have permanently impaired the future welfare of those for whom we are responsible. This leads us to try to be perfect in the discharge of our duties and thus prevent serious injury to our children. In other words, we would like to love them perfectly, which, if we were able to do, would ill prepare them for their life in this world.

Furthermore, and more importantly, implicit in this anxiety is a grave misconception of what it means to be a Christian. The test of our love and faith is not the absence of failure and sin and problems, but lies in what we are able to do about them. Of course, Christian parents get angry with their children and say and do things that hurt them. We are haunted by the signs in our children that we have failed them, by the evidences of their anxiety, by the problems they sometimes have in relation to other people, by their lying and stealing, by their hostility and quarrelsomeness, and by their excessive compet.i.tiveness and jealousy. Sometimes the scenes around the family table are far different from our image of what Christian family life and fellows.h.i.+p should be. We wonder where we have failed, grow discouraged, and fail again. We are embarra.s.sed by the contradiction that our children see between the things that we say and the things that we do.

Parents and teachers who, like Mrs. Strait, live by the law, either have to blind themselves to what's going on in their relations.h.i.+ps or else become profoundly discouraged. And if we are like Mr. Churchill, our decision will be to ignore human problems and to turn ourselves to a devotion of G.o.d, as if that were possible! Dr. Manby would wait for time to take care of the matter, and Mr. Knowles would frantically cram more knowledge about the Bible into the minds of parents and children in the hope that, somehow or other, knowing about G.o.d and Christian teaching would produce the necessary changes. Mr. Clarke, of course, would turn the whole "mess" over to the clergy.

Implicit in the situations we have been discussing is a concept of success, the a.s.sumption being that if we love G.o.d and our neighbor everything we do will turn out all right. My grandfather always maintained that his business prospered because he kept the laws of G.o.d.

When we stop to think about it, we realize what a faulty concept this is. After all, it was not easy for Christ to accomplish the purposes of love in this world, and there is no reason why it should be any easier for us. It is not easy to maintain the dialogue of life; it is not easy to call forth the being of others; it is not easy to regain the freedom to love even when we respond to the spirit of love. We recognize the credibility and promise of all these principles, but wonder at the difficulty of their application.

_The Work of Love_

We need to remember that even G.o.d, with all of His power and wisdom, does not give His love to us in ways that take away our freedom of response. He leaves us free to say Yes or No to Him, to love, to our families, and to all the responsibilities of life. This means, as we saw earlier, that we are to speak the word of love and leave the other person free to make his response. We cannot expect a guaranteed response from him. We cannot prevent him from making a wrong response any more than we can make him give the right response. Our children are free, and we must respect that freedom. This is why the achievement of a love relations.h.i.+p is so exceedingly difficult. In the achievement of any relations.h.i.+p we are involved in a life-and-death struggle. Our children, for instance, want our love, care, and protection. At the same time, they want to be their own selves and to a.s.sume responsibility for their own lives. They can and do resent, with devastating hostility, action on our part that looks to them like interference with their lives. On the other hand, we love them and feel that we cannot do enough for them. The effect of our zeal often is to overwhelm them with our care and deprive them of the freedom in which to achieve their power of being.

Inevitably, then, the living dialogue between the parent and the child is both a happy and a troubled one in which the powers of love and resentment are exerted on both sides. The struggle between freedom and tyranny in human relations is understood in the struggle of the cross, which takes place in every individual and in every relations.h.i.+p. The actualization of ourselves in relation to one another is both difficult and painful. It is hard to understand how anybody could ever think it was easy. The struggle calls for a love that is prepared to lay down its life for its friends. The entrance of love into life brings, sometimes, not peace but a sword. Tension and conflict may accompany the work of love. The conflict between the love of G.o.d and the self-centeredness of man produces an ugly, rugged, and b.l.o.o.d.y struggle, which the crucifixion summarized.

_The Power of Love_

The good news of the gospel is not that a way has been given us by which to avoid conflict, but that the power of love has been given us for the conflict. With it we can enter into the shambles of life with a.s.surance, courage, and a belief that, even though we cannot always understand what is going on, the purpose of love is to reunite man and man, and that in Christ G.o.d's love won the initial victory in this process. We may, therefore, partic.i.p.ate in the life of the world with all of its conflicts, including our own personal conflicts, with faith in the power of reuniting love. We should not be surprised when we find ourselves embroiled in conflict and involved in complex situations. Our faith is not in our ability to do right, but in the power of G.o.d to help us re-enter the difficult and unpleasant situations we have created with new hope and with healing love. We may be thankful that G.o.d revealed Himself through a cross and, therefore, made clear how realistic He is in relation to the characteristics and conditions of human existence.

The power of love is liberating. It frees us so that we can use what happens between us as a part of the curriculum of Christian living and learning. Instead of wasting our time worrying about why things happen, we can use our energies and our understandings to deal with them constructively. The purpose of Christianity is not alone the prevention of crime, but the redemption of criminals; not alone the prevention of sin, but the saving of sinners. The great Christian word is redemption, which means transforming a destructive relations.h.i.+p into one in which the conditions and purposes of love are realized. Let us remember that fine linen paper is made out of old dirty rags. Similarly, a wonderful Christian relations.h.i.+p can be formed out of one that seems tragic. As we have seen, the test of a man is not in what happens to him, but in what he does about what happens to him. The transformation of what happens in human relations is the work of the Holy Spirit, continuing the work that was begun in Christ. The Spirit gives the gift of reconciling love with which we may partic.i.p.ate in the continuing work of Christ, which is the redemption and transformation of life. So in the context of this love we can relax while we also exercise our care.

_Love and Sin_

The power of love over sin is widely recognized. In the first place, there is no judgment like the judgment implicit in love. The face of love is compa.s.sionate, but it gives a light that reveals the darkness of our hearts. We know that we are judged, but we know also that we are not condemned. The judgment and the forgiveness come to us as a part of the communication of love. Have we not felt this as we stood in the presence of someone whose love was true? We wished to be rid of everything in us that was unworthy of that love. In that same instant there may have welled up within us a repentance and a determination to live in response to that purifying, reuniting love. Such is our experience when the Spirit of Christ brings us face to face with Him and His love. To be loved is to be illumined, purified, and transformed, because love has the power of re-creation.

Parents and others who are conscious of their failures and sins in relation to their loved ones should remember that human beings are fundamentally resilient and resourceful. Children's springs of life and vitality are powerful. Their need to affirm themselves as persons is undeniable, and any experience of love that they have is reinforcing.

Experiences of unlove are to them unbelievable and point, fundamentally and finally, to the necessity and believability of love. While our children are dependent upon us for their personal environment in which to grow up, they bring powers and resources to their growing up which are independent of us. They bring something to the dialogue in which self-actualization occurs. Their part of the dialogue is just as important and indispensable as ours. We cannot live their lives for them. They have to live their own lives, and our part is to live in relation to them and contribute our a.s.sistance to their powers of becoming.

Parents and teachers are not the only ones who influence their children.

We live in a society in which different people have different roles to play in relation to everyone else. We should not measure the progress of a child only by how we see him or by what we think he is receiving from us. Our impression of the child's progress may be mistaken. We may not be able to know him as he is, nor know what others are contributing.

And, least of all, can we know the total effect of all his relations.h.i.+ps on what he is becoming as a person. Our anxieties about a particular incident may exist because we fail to see it in its total context. Much happens in the development of a person's life that we do not see, and much of the transformation occurs secretly at levels so deep that we cannot observe it. Although we may not see what is happening, we may be sure that something is. In the sphere of the personal we need to trust both G.o.d and man, and if we trust G.o.d we can trust man. We then may take a long view of our task, and teach and work and live by faith.

This is what it should mean to be a Christian and a member of the church of Christ. What a wonderful thing it is to belong to a fellows.h.i.+p that is made up of people who may be united by the Spirit of G.o.d and through whom we believe that G.o.d works! What a comfort it is to know that we do not have to do and believe everything ourselves! Not only do we not have to live and believe and love for ourselves, but others live and believe and love for us at times when we cannot. But let us also remember that we have to live and believe and love for them when weakness or doubt or hostility seems to overwhelm them. This is the meaning of Christian fellows.h.i.+p; namely, that we are not an aggregation of individuals, but instead are members of one body, with every member having his own function, and the function of every member standing in a complementary relation to that of the others, of which body Christ is the head. Here is the source of the love about which we have been speaking and the process through which love is lived in the life of the world that G.o.d loves.

[11] Luke 10:27.

[12] From _Love, Power and Justice_, by Paul Tillich, Oxford University Press, Copyright, 1954. Used by permission.

[13] 1 John 4:10. The t.i.tle of this book was suggested by the familiar opening words of this verse in the King James Version, "Herein is love...."

[14] Matt. 10:8.

[15] See Luke 19:2 ff.

[16] See Luke 7:37 ff.

IV

SOME OBJECTIVES OF LOVE

"Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth."--_1 John 3:18_

The objective of love, as we have seen, is to "move everything to everything else that is," especially to reunite person to person. This is an identifying characteristic of the love of G.o.d, and it is to some degree the characteristic of all love. We believe that this love was incarnate in Jesus Christ. We believe that His Spirit, active in the world in which we live, seeks to incarnate this love in us here and now.

Furthermore, we have identified some more general characteristics of love. Now we turn to look at some of the ways in which love accomplishes its purpose, a purpose which is the responsibility of the church in its dispersion in the life of the world.

_Love's Sphere Is Personal_

The sphere of love's action is in the realm of the personal; it acts in and through relations.h.i.+ps. The process by which the person emerges is both wonderful and fearful, and one for which we should have reverence, the zeal to understand, and the willingness to be responsible for.

Certain specific things need to be accomplished which are the work of love, which we have already identified as the calling forth of persons.

In this work of love we partic.i.p.ate in the reconciling work of G.o.d in Christ today. Let us remember also that children first experience the love of G.o.d through their experience of their parents' love, and that parents in loving their children are loving G.o.d, since we love G.o.d by loving one another. How else can we love G.o.d than by loving one another?

With this understanding of the context in which we live and work and serve one another, let us turn our attention to how love's task is accomplished.

First, however, a word about what that task is not. The objective of love is not to create or nurture a so-called normal human being. In the first place, there is no universal concept of the normal, and the criterion of normality varies from age to age and from culture to culture. All men have problems and always will have them. The pursuit of perfection is a perilous project that may cause all kinds of imperfections and will inevitably produce disillusionment.

Adjustment cannot be the goal of Christian living and the objective of love. The clam is adjusted about as well as any of G.o.d's creatures, but has very little to offer beyond a pa.s.sive role in a bowl of soup.

Instead of striving to mold a person completely adjusted to his surroundings, love seeks to nurture a person who is capable of maintaining a creative tension between his need and his responsibility, between the vitality of spirit and the form of being. And, according to tests, such creative people often are cla.s.sified as not normal and not well adjusted.

Nor is the pursuit of happiness the objective of love. Happiness for human beings is a forlorn hope. Because of conflicts within himself and between himself and others, man is doomed to be unhappy most of the time. He is always having to deal with the inevitable conflicts and accidents of life that give him a sense of vulnerability, both as an individual and as a member of his tribe, nation, or race. Instead, the objective of love is to provide the human being with resources, by means of which he may face his human existence with courage and with a sense of peace that pa.s.ses understanding. It now remains for us to spell this out in human terms.