In her book, Twelve
Steps to a Compassionate Life, comparative religions scholar Karen
Armstrong says that Gandhi, by the end of his life, “claimed that he no longer
hated anybody. He might have hated the oppressive system of British
colonialism, but he could not hate the people who implemented it.
‘Mine
is not an exclusive love,’” said Gandhi. “‘For…a love that is based on the
goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.’”1
Linger with that phrase: A
love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary
affair.
Gandhi, a Hindu, lived what I would call a Gospel faith so
much more faithfully than I have ever dared to live it. Embracing Jesus throws
us into a paradox. He invites us to commit our entire being – heart, soul,
mind, and strength – to the disciplines of agape Love. The paradox mystifies us
when we realize that committing our whole selves to Love means emptying ourselves
as completely as Jesus “emptied” and “humbled” himself (Philippians
2:7-8). To love as we are loved means
both denying and claiming the fullness of our God-imaged humanity.
This is extraordinarily difficult for us. Always rewarding
competition over compassion, fear over gratitude, greed over generosity, and
pride over humility, first-world cultures reduce faithfulness to a narrow set
of broad loyalties. It comes across as a kind of God and country syndrome in which the regurgitation of certain
dogmas and slogans are all one needs to give the appearance of devotion. That
veneer allows the individual to claim entitlement to a degree of excess that robs
the disadvantaged of their opportunity to thrive and the privileged of their
deeper and truer humanity. The “Christian nation” of Great Britain in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw nothing inconsistent with combining
Jesus-speak and imperialism. That same social/religious paradigm leads many of
us to confuse excess and well-being with God’s blessing and, therefore, poverty
and hardship with God’s judgment. (Thus, a US congressman can dismiss the
majority of those with pre-existing medical conditions as bad people.2)
It seems to me that, Jesus, not to be undone by the
frailties of his followers, often goes underground. He relentlessly seeks
alternative ways and means of doing Love’s transforming work in the world. Now,
I do trust that God always abides in and for the Church, and loves the creation in and through the Church. I also trust that God acts
through any one or any institution who, at any given time, has the capacity for
enduring the paradox of the fulfilling emptiness of grace. But oh, what a joy
it is when the Church finds the grace to be truly faithful to Love!
Richard
Rohr writes these words of assurance and summons: “The great thing about God’s
love is that it’s not determined by the object. God does not love us
because we are good. God loves us because God is good.”3
When
following Jesus, we are not mercenaries. We are enfleshed expressions of the presence
of God’s transforming and resurrecting Love in and for the world.
May
we all be emptied into the fullness of that promise.
Peace,
Allen
1Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. Pp. 181-182.
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