Loving Our Neighbor
We humans are relational creatures. In the normal course of things, we develop bonds of caring and support that, when they grow strong enough, we call love. This love can be reflected in action, such as when we tend to wounds, offer gifts, hug and hold, when we visit another, smile at him, cook and clean for her, read to him, give her money or clothes, smile, or pray.
We can also show love by sacrificing ourselves for our beloved. It is said we know how much God loves us because he gave his first born son to save us. To be like Jesus, then, must we also die? Some people have given their lives for loved ones, and even for strangers. Most of the time, though, I suspect God will accept less drastic sacrifices.
Yet who are we sacrificing for? Who is our beloved? According to Christian Scriptures, our beloved is our neighbor, yet this neighbor also includes our enemy. Can we possibly be expected to sacrifice for our enemy? Can we even love him?
Types of Love
Perhaps we could if we stretch a point. The Greek terms for love include the word storge which is normally thought of as parental empathy and tenderness, though it can mean acceptance and tolerance. At times, I can tolerate and even accept my t enemy. To think of loving my enemy in the sense of philia, as a friend, is more difficult. Harder still is to love this nemesis with the individual and passionate intimacy of eros.
Yet Richard Rohr points out that eros is more like agape, divine love, than we think. Indeed, he writes that “human love and passion prepare us for and lead us to divine love.” [1] When we lust for the ecstasy of union, he explains, we discover that this desire can never be fully satisfied by a human partner. No matter how much we strive to find our fullness in another person, we cannot. So we come to thirst for that which does satisfy us, a loving union with God.
Thus does the heady rush of eros lead us toward the deeper and sweeter agape love, which allows us to see the other as a reflection of the divine. When viewed through this lens, our neighbors truly do seem as valuable as we are, and we can even love our enemies. [2]
Loving That Which Is Us
According to Cynthia Bourgeault, this does not mean that we love the other person the way we love our families or even “as much as” we love ourselves. Rather, we come to see our neighbor, and our enemy, as “the intimate expression of [our] own being.” [3] We and they are one. How can we not love that which is also us?
The Buddhist story of Kisa Gotami, which I shared last year, reveals this kind of love.
When Kisa Gotami’s son dies, she is inconsolable. For days, she carries her dead baby around, begging everyone she sees to wake him up. Finally, someone directs her to the Buddha, who tells her that he will bring the boy back to life if she can bring him a mustard seed from a home where no one has ever died. This task proves to be impossible, and a defeated Kisa returns to the Buddha. But first, she lays her child down in the forest, for she has come to understand that death is part of life.
From this experience, Kisa developed a yearning to learn from the Buddha. Soon, she took vows and became a nun. Enlightened, she understood that she was one with everyone she met, so she offered her love to them all, without exception.
The Pain of Love
What she did not do, however, was to return home to her husband. If she had any other children, she left them, as well. She gave up the loves of storge and eros, pursuing agape instead.
At last week’s Recovery Church meeting, we discussed the challenge of re-opening oneself to love after one has experienced great loss, whether that loss came through death or a betrayal of some kind. To purposefully leave oneself open to heart-shattering pain seems foolish, yet to wall ourselves off, to push intimacy away, to distrust and discourage, is even more foolish. Could this emptying of ourselves, this longing to experience nothing but the refined and distant love of agape be a way to avoid the suffering of loss?
I do not mean to disparage Kiso Gotami’s decision. Hers is the path of the Bodhisattva, and an honorable path it is. However, to love everyone is also to love no one, at least not in an intimate way. When we dwell in that realm of mystical oneness, we know that we can never possess another. We have no husband, child, mother, father, wife, sister, aunt, nephew, for they are not “ours.” They don’t belong to us, and we don’t belong to them. For a Bodhisattva or a Christian saint, who desire no love in return for the love they offer, relationships might matter, but the individual person to whom we relate does not. A saint will love you, whoever you are, and then move on to the next person, feeling no attachment to what she has left behind.
The Courage to Risk
As a nun, a follower of the Buddha, one who blesses and loves from afar, Kisa never again had to risk experiencing that deep, possessive, passionate love that leaves us open to despair when it is gone. Her story shows us that if we can make our way through the misery of despair toward enlightenment or emptying, we will find a kind of peace.
If we are brave, we will choose to love again, even though we know love will not last forever. Not only do we mortal beings have the inconvenient tendency to die and leave our beloveds behind, we also betray them in fiercer ways. For instance, we may confuse love with lust, greed, and power over another. But eros is not simply sexual desire, nor is it the ownership of another person. True eros is a longing to make our beloved happy, to serve and tend to her needs, to be patient and kind and forgiving. Asserting power and authority has nothing to do with love. Nothing.
Since such false love abounds in our world, does this mean some of us are unable to love?
Rejecting Our Children
A Scandinavian folk tale tells of a pastor’s wife who was afraid to have children. She bought a spell from the village witch that allowed her to destroy each of the six souls who were waiting to be born through her. When the woman hurled some stones into a well, she heard six faint, childlike cries. A great relief fell over her, for she knew then that she was safe from motherhood.
The thrust of the story is the stern anger of her husband and the forgiveness of God. Yet I wonder why the woman so feared being a mother. What did she think it would be like? Did she dread the work and inconvenience? Was her husband so harsh and cruel that she didn’t dare bring a child into the relationship, into a home without love? Or was she herself incapable of loving, so that she feared how she would respond to a helpless baby? What kind of family had she grown up in? Were her parents empty and cold?
Early in my career as a chaplain for people with addictions, I worked with a new mother who was detoxing from heroin. Her infant was still in the hospital, but soon the mother would be able to be with him at a special treatment center that housed mothers and their young children. The woman told me how much she longed to be a good mother, to love her baby, yet the next day her boyfriend showed up outside, offering her sex and drugs and that promise of completeness that so lures the lonely soul.
Choosing Our Addictions Over Love
I stood by the mother’s side while she anguished over what to do, but the thought of a baby she had barely had a chance to hold could not win out over the lure of a drug and the memory of a man who had once held her in his arms, offering her the fantasy that someone loved her. An infant has little to offer a woman who is starved for love herself. So she left the unit, knowing that by doing so, she was relinquishing all rights to raise her child.
For a few moments, I felt shocked. Being a mother myself, I could not imagine betraying an infant for the sake of some temporary high, for a relationship with a man himself dependent on pretensions of happiness. I don’t know if she was more addicted to the drug or the man, but it didn’t matter. She was lost.
Nothing I or anyone else said or did could make a difference. Perhaps Buddha would have known what to say to change her mind, and maybe not. We are human; we betray one another. When we do so, the act tears us apart, even if we don’t realize it. If we are fortunate, from the wound, a deeper kind of love will emerge. If she is lucky, one day that young mother will wake from her addictions and find she is more beloved and worthy than she ever thought. She may wake up forgiven.
God’s Love, No Matter What
Some people, doubtless, would say that such a mother can never earn forgiveness for such an act. In the Scandinavian tale, the pastor would be such a one. After he forces his wife to admit that she has murdered the souls of their unborn children, he tells her that never, not until flowers grow from the slate roof of their house, will she be forgiven. Then he evicts her from his home.
Years later, she returns to the house, exhausted, limping, wearing the tattered clothing of a beggar. Not recognizing her, the housekeeper lets her in, giving her a spot before the fire to sleep.
The next morning, the pastor comes downstairs and discovers her, dead. Right away he recognizes her, yet before we can learn what he thinks about it, the housekeeper cries out that he must come outside and see. A miracle has occurred. As the pastor looks where she is pointing, he discovers that from the tiles of their slate roof, flowers have sprouted and bloomed.
Did God forgive the woman at that very moment when she tossed the stones into the well, or did she have to earn God’s forgiveness through years of suffering? Maybe her suffering taught her how to love. Is that why she was forgiven? Yet is it fair to ask us to earn forgiveness or love any more than we must earn grace? If no one has loved or cared for us, how can we learn to love ourselves or others? Is that really our fault?
Loving One Another into Love
Unfortunately, too few of us have been adequately loved. That lack is revealed by our own inability to love our neighbor. I don’t care what kind of love we’re talking about, to be true, it must be gentle, kind, forgiving, accepting, and generous. Love thinks less of itself and more of the other, which does not mean the lover is unimportant. If we cannot love and care for ourselves, we will not be able to love and care for anyone else, not even our own children.
The unloved child grows to be the scared, angry, bitter adult. Can we help these unhappy people to love themselves and others?
I believe God’s love is big enough for everyone and strong enough to heal all pain. But we humans also have a role in such healing. First, though, we must seek to heal ourselves. Then, like Kisa Gotami, we can learn to love others, even our enemies. If we care about the unloved and unlovable, if we can show them an abundance of agape, maybe they can learn to care about themselves. In this way, little by little, even the most unloving soul may learn to love his neighbor.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Rohr, Richard, “Purity and Passion,” Center for Action and Contempation, November 13, 2017, https://cac.org/purity-and-passion-2017-11-13/ accessed December 16, 2017.
- See, for example, Mark 12:30 and Luke 6:27.
- Bourgeault, Cynthia, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity (Shambhala: 2010), 121, quoted by Richard Rohr in “Purity and Passion.”
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Copyright © 2017 Barbara E. Stevens