Fundamentals: Love Again

This is only a little thing, but it helps me think about the nature of love in the cosmos.  I started by describing the birthplace of stars, the explosive violence at the center and beginning of the universe.  That’s the macro picture of love. 

Now for the micro.  Since about 1959 some biologists have become increasingly aware of horizontal gene transfer, where-in an organism shares genetic material with another which is not its offspring®.  That’s like me giving you a coat if you’re cold, or you bringing me medicine when I’m sick.  I think Jesus had a few things to say about that.  As we become more complex systems of cells, we lose the ability to be altruistic naturally.  It’s no longer part of how we operate.  But it’s still there, peeking out in the most unlikely places: love, whether it’s clashing and roiling, or slipping useful adaptations among cells, or giving hard earned cash to anyone less fortunate than yourself, the love of God, the love who is God, reflected in creation.

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® The other kind of gene transfer is vertical, just to keep our metaphors straight.

Fundamentals: Love Part II

Surely my understanding of love is influenced by my having been raised in a relatively stable household in a time of great prosperity».  I can’t help it: God’s love means something to me that it doesn’t mean to a 12^th century Spanish mystic or a Bronze Age patriarch stumbling out of Ur.  And their sense of love is alien to me, too.  I realize that there are people in this profoundly privileged epoch who don’t see it that way.  In fact, I knew a woman who was reticent to even tell her own children she loved them, lest they grow accustomed to it and take it for granted.  God, for her, felt the same.  God’s love is not ubiquitous; it must be curried like a Dark Age feudal lord’s favor.  Go figure.  Relative to both my past and my reflection, I think that the ubiquity of God’s love forces people to take it for granted.

I cannot help seeing the universe through the lens of love.  When St. John says, “God is love”, he isn’t looking at that God and that love through my privileged twenty first century eyes.  He never read a Hallmark card and didn’t have any memories of those little naked doe-eyed people from the seventies saying things like, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”à He didn’t love chocolate cake, had never made love to a woman·. 

In love making there is a disruption of everything, a disordering and chaotic grinding together.  In the aftermath there is at least the possibility of new arising from the ashes of the old.  Cells collide, combine and divide, splitting and joining. 

            That kind of love, shredding division and clanging union, is powerful. 

            Love is fundamental and paradoxical.  Life is brutish and short.  All organisms are genetically selfish.  That is to say, they do not share useful adaptations with just everyone.  They only pass those along to their offspring.  So a dolphin, for example, isn’t going to give you the genes necessary to hold your breath for a long time.  That wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, scientists speculate, when simple single celled organisms had porous walls and were able to give and take genetic code from one another.  So if you as a cell had some beneficial adaptation, you could give it to me. 

            Clearly those cells don’t behave that way because they’re kind or altruistic, but in a sense love is a mindless giving.  Love is promiscuous.  It doesn’t care who it touches and rubs up against.  It gives to its last breath.  Jesus said that God showers the just and the unjust.

            When I was a gardener, I watered my garden.  I carefully set up the sprinklers to hit only my plants, with a minimum of overspray.  That way I wasn’t wasting water.  Love, on the other hand, is naturally wasteful.  It falls not only on my deserving garden, but on the lawn, the weeds, the trees, the roof, the sidewalk, the street: everywhere in wasteful abundance.

The good news of Jesus is about love.  When Jesus was asked the key to the Law and the Prophets, he said, like any good rabbi, that the commandment to love God with one’s totality is where it’s at.  Actually, the Hebrew tradition in which Jesus was so steeped was too visceral, too bodily, too bloody for as soft a summary as that. 

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength¥.

Then, just like any good rabbi, and in keeping with the scriptures of his people, Jesus couldn’t resist adding a second bit to the question of which Law summarized them all.

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Then he told the story of the Samaritan, the dying man, and the innkeeper, to show that neighbors are not just those people who look, think, speak, smell, spend, believe, worship, eat, make love, and keep house like we do or would like to do.  Neighbors can be enemies, as Jesus reminded his hearers in another place.µ 

            At the risk of sounding like those tough guys who have in recent years  taken the men’s movement of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s and recycled it into a Christian manhood movement with a macho Christ who can hunt, throw a football, and open bottles of light beer bottles with his wedding ring, love is tough.  It’s strong and abrasive and natural.

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» Not that we saw much of that prosperity.  The 1970’s aren’t remembered as times of enormous wealth for Americans.   My family was no different.  Even before Reganomics trickled down and made us fabulously lower middle class we didn’t have much.  But every day of my childhood I ate, lived under a roof, had access to clean water.  We even had toys and a television.  Compared to the rest of the world, and most of history, we lived like kings.    

à Which is, in my thinking, both profound and a tremendous load of crap all at once.  One of the ways I express love is in apology.    On the other hand, I would hope that I could be gracious enough to forgive before I’m asked to do so.

· I assume, based on his time, not his virginity or studliness.  Maybe first century people “made love”, but I’ve never heard it referred to that way.

¥ Look at The Story of Heaven.

µ There are plenty of resources available to tell you how many times Jesus talked about various things, most usually noted are money, love, hell, and homosexuality.  Suffice it to say that Jesus talked a lot about love.

Fundamentals: Love #I

            When my daughter was in fifth grade I chaperoned her class to an over night trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  We spent about five or six hours flitting from one area scientific inquiry to another before racking out in a hallway for a solid four hours of fifth-grade shut eye.  At some point during our museum meanderings we sat in the planetarium and watched a film about what the Big Bang might very well have looked like, if an Imax film crew had been there and if Archimedes had shared his place to stand.  Liam Neeson narrated.  His smooth baritone was both a full frontal assault and a warm blanket.  We watched explosions and flashes of light as Neeson rumbled at us, telling us that it is in chaos that the worlds come into being.  The birth of everything was a great clash, a violence that spins out into the universe and down to this very day.  Material existence, including us carbon based life forms, is violent and terrible.  Maybe especially so for life forms.

            The beauty of the film and Neeson’s authority captivated me, but the narration made little sense.  I started thinking about the little films of cellular division I saw when I was in fifth grade.  There was struggle, to be sure, and a great rending, but after it was over, there were two, then four, then sixteen cells.  I don’t know that violence and chaos is the best language for talking about that microscopic process or for the cosmic events forming and shaping our universe.  I wonder if the overarching theme might not instead be love. 

            There are people who argue that the story that unfolds in the first chapter of Genesis is really not about creation ex nihilo, but is instead a tale of order from chaos.  Read it again, you’ll see that they’re right.  That doesn’t mean that God did not create ex nihilo, but instead that the Genesis story takes place much later, after chaos crept in.  And God, whose breath hovers beautifully and poetically over the face of the waters, speaks order into the elements already swirling about. 

In a sense, that’s what love does.  Love brings order where there was none, not like Mussolini or some other fascist making the trains run on time, but like DNA allowing a tiger to be.  Love might be at the bottom (or top, or side, or around, or through) everything we see and don’t see.  And the reason some things seem wrong is that they’ve slipped the track and are no longer expressing love.

Fundamentals: God, Part I

I’m thinking about the way people talk about God. I mean religious types. Like me, maybe. Usually we use ancient Greek philosophical categories to speak of God: omni- -ent words like omnipresent ,. I’m well aware that I’m not the first person to point that out, nor am I the first person to lament that state of affairs. Nothing new here; but bear with me for a while. All language mediates, and all complex language is a series of extended metaphors. When I say that all language mediates, I mean that the words – grunts, groans, grinds, and glottal stops – are a way of conveying something we cannot carry to other people for them to see, smell, hear, and experience. We cannot carry it, so instead we bring them words. We translate the experience into words and they translate the words into experience, in what might be humanity’s greatest asset and greatest curse: imagination.
As a writer, I love adjectives and adverbs. They can colour and nuance a phrase and make it pop. But maybe using adjectives to speak of God does God a disservice. In the anti-hellinization conversation, we say that it isn’t always useful to speak of God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc., because the scriptures do not bother to do so. We say that it might be better to use the language of the people who encountered God (sometimes in a completely unmediated way) and recorded their thoughts in what we now call the Bible. The Hebrews didn’t go for abstractions. They used metaphors, to be sure, but metaphors that hit closer to home and whose referents could be seen in everyday life. So, God was for them rock, king, fortress, and redeemer-kinsman. God rides on the clouds, God’s voice makes things happen.
Carrying that idea further, I’m thinking that maybe we should be careful about using mediated language to speak of God – the language of adjectives: loving, beautiful, merciful, kind, judging, etc. Instead, perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to begin to speak of God as exclusively as possible in nouns and verbs. Two outcomes immediately spring to mind from such an effort.
First, it makes God less abstract. The Epistle of First John, for example, likely written at least by a friend of a friend of Jesus, says that God is love. That is unmediated language at it’s purest. Love is not tempered by the addition of a suffix like –ing. Moderns/post-moderns would be tempted to say that God is loving. And, no doubt, God is loving. John (or John’s friend) wasn’t interested in parsing God away, though. God is love. Does that mean, therefore that love is God? Maybe, in some sense, encountering even something as faint as the love a mother hen shows her chicks shows us God. John does go on to say that to live in love is to live in God. When we encounter love, even lower case, small potatoes, easy-cheesy love, it ought to make us think of God.
I do a little acting in a community theatre (you know it’s artsy because it has the
–re, instead of –er). While were rehearsing “It’s A Wonderful Life” a few years ago, I realized that the story was a parable of love. There is no God figure per se, but the love and sacrifice of common people, spurred by the uncommonly common love of George Bailey, defeats evil in a very theologically appropriate way. Evil, perpetrated by (and in a way, personified by) Mr. Potter simply melts away, forgotten. That love made me think about the love who is God. It also says something very powerful about the nature of evil, but I’ll hold that thought.
Second, we’d be better able to see the ways all virtue, all characteristics, all of the cosmos are reflections of God. Maybe other things like kindness and beauty we see around us are emanations of God’s own beauty and love. I do not mean to speak like a modalist or a pantheist, but maybe the pantheists (or, better still, the panentheists) have something to teach us here, that God is not contained by our clumsy attempts at definition or description and that God’s works might show God peeking through the paint.
The other part of speech to examine, in addition to nouns, verbs, and adjectives to speak of God is conjunctions. As School House Rock taught me, “and, but, and or, they get most of the work done.” Let’s talk about buts,,. “God is loving,” I’ve been reminded, “but he’s also just.” “Just what?” never gets the laughs I hope for, but I keep going. In fact, it’s almost as though one segment of the Church has invented a new theological term, “lovingbut”. To say that God is love and God brings justice might be more Old Testamentish.
“Brings justice” uses verbs. In nouns: God is the best judge in one of those cases where an old woman is tossed out of her house so developers can make a killing and the court sides with the old lady and gives her back her home plus a ridiculous amount of damages. That’s Old Testament justice. To bring justice in the OT meant to make sure that the wealthy didn’t become so on the backs of the poor and that the hungry were fed, widows looked after, and that aliens fairly treated.
A lot of modern Christian conceptualizations of justice looks like a gunslinger riding into town, blowing everyone straight to hell, mumbling some cryptic wisdom, then leaving the young widow and her ten year old son to her now-restored farm. That ain’t far from the truth. It just stops short, is all. Old Testament style justice is about bad guys getting theirs, but it’s also about the poor being elevated, the hungry filled, and the full going away empty-handed. That last bit’s what’s hard to swallow. I’m full. I’ll go away empty. Not because I took it from someone, but because I didn’t share it with my neighbor.
There’s another thing about God: God is unfair. Those third world theologians who pioneered liberation theology liked to say that God has a preferential option for the poor. “Foul!” first-worlders cry. “God doesn’t have favorites!”
But if you want to find God, unadorned, raw, obvious, look at the bottom of the human pile. Jesus is in prison, in the soup line, holding her child dying in the desert south of Tucson. God apparently likes being in the mud of humanity. God chooses slaves, clowns, and sinners over the powerful, the wise, and the righteous. At least, Jesus seemed to see it that way.
And that preference extends to giving away my hard earned stuff to those who didn’t work for it. At least, that’s what the Bible says again and again. I don’t like it any more than you do. Although I scrape from week to week to make ends meet, I’m a king compared to the rest of the world. And the Magnificat says that God pulls the powerful from their thrones. Great. In my little house, we’ve got three.


, Isn’t it interesting that the triumvirate of God-words – omniscient (all knowing), omnipresent (present everywhere), omnipotent (all powerful) is so concise but there isn’t a compact word for all loving? The 1611 English translation of the Bible uses the term lovingkindness to translate a Hebrew word that means . . . well, it means lovingkindness. I’ve seen bumper stickers recently that say, “Lovingkindness Is My Religion”, usually on cars of people who don’t self-identify as Christians, but whose impulses are pretty close to the gospel of Jesus. “Lovingkindness-is-my-religion” is actually quite in keeping with the way St. James (not the Bible translation authorizing guy, I mean the epistler in the New Testament) defines true religion: visiting widows and orphans in their affliction and keeping away from the favoritism of wealth. The words we use and even the words we do not use but have access to shape our understanding of God.

,, Remember in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when he said, “Everyone’s got a big but. Let’s talk about your big but, Simone”?