Apr 242014
 

As a topic of interest, mysticism includes thinking about theology and other spiritual subjects, and states or events of consciousness are certainly among them.  In fact, it seems to me that those of us who are fascinated by mysticism spend a lot of our time thinking and talking about these things.  To people just beginning to scratch the surface of mysticism, it could even look like that kind of thinking and talking is pretty much all mysticism is about!  But mysticism isn’t just a topic of interest, or even a way of thinking.  Mysticism is a way of life, and this article will join others in this blog by trying to offer an approach to its practical dimension.  Said another way, today I’m inviting us to consider how to bring mysticism into our everyday ordinary experience and action, and more specifically by considering the practice of empathy.

What is Empathy?

Here is a definition of empathy provided by Merriam-Webster:

the [capacity or] action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner

Let’s note that empathy can be in thought or in feeling, and in both at the same time.  This is an important point, because most of us lean more toward either thinking or feeling in our way of connecting with and understanding others, some of us are at one of the extremes of this polarity, and all of us can find one or the other more challenging at at times.  Therefore, as it is defined here, empathy is possible for anyone to practice at anytime, although each of us will vary somewhat in exactly how that practice comes most naturally in the moment.

How can Empathy be Mystical?

Mysticism is about the faith and hope in, and the pursuit of or opening to, realizing direct, unmediated, union with the Divine One.  The essential mystical experience is thus a complete loss of any subject-object duality between self and God, and involves a dissolution of all concepts, feelings, and perceptions of any “other,” even if it seems to have been only for a brief flashing moment when reflected upon from ordinary consciousness.  Yet empathy actually requires the subject-object duality of perceiving another entity with its own inner experiences.  So how can it be mystical?

Many mystics who claim to who have had the essential mystical experience have realized in its aftermath that at the deepest levels of their being they were already intimately connected with God.  In fact, Genesis 2:7 makes it clear that the Nishmat Hayyim (nishmat = breath, spirit, or soul; hayyim = of life) that animates Adam is God’s own breath or spirit, which in Christianity we call the Holy Spirit.  This breath is obviously not literally the air we breathe, so the analogy informs us that the Nishmat Hayyim is just as necessary and universally present to all human beings, both around us and within us, as the oxygen that is essential to our physical existence.

Those mystics who have received and realized the essential mystical experience can know this truth as immediately as we each know our own existence – we are all children of the Divine One, each of us always in direct communion with the Holy Spirit, and thus we are always in communion with each other in our deepest or highest dimension of being.

For example, the Book of Acts records the Apostle Paul  as preaching this:

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth … he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. … ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

In her Revelations of Divine Love, the great mystic St. Julian of Norwich similarly says:

Our soul is so fully united to God of His own Goodness that absolutely nothing comes between God and our soul.  …  It is more worshipful to behold God in all than in any special thing.

And this is also the greatest significance of  words Jesus Christ speaks in prayer according to the Gospel of John:

I have given them [my followers] the glory you [God] gave me, so they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. Father, I want these whom you have given me to be with me where I am.

And yet, it isn’t possible to be fully present to our individualized places in creation, and thus in dualistic interactions with others, while simultaneously having our awareness completely dissolved in the Divine One without the faintest hint of subject-object duality.  It is possible, however, to be mindful that our individual beings are occurring in and of the One, just as the more or less distinct thoughts of a mind are nonetheless each expressions of and united with the mind that thinks them – their essence is one.  In fact, just as the words prayed by Jesus suggest, the fully realized mystic can be immediately aware of union with and in the Divine One that both encompasses and flows through all our dualistic perceptions of self and others.

Sacred-heart-of-jesus-ibarraranBecause each human being is one with God at heart, it follows that empathy, the capacity or act of seeking deeper understanding and communion with another human being, leads us into deeper and more complete communion with the Divine One.  The scriptures teach us not only to love God with all that we are, but also to love others as ourselves, because both are necessary for the most complete experience and expression of the unity Jesus prayed for us to know.  This is also the deepest understanding of Christianity’s tradition of regarding an encounter with a stranger as a potential visitation from Christ.   To practice empathy with this understanding is therefore to engage it as a mystical practice.

How do we Practice Empathy?

As noted before, there are two primary categories of empathic experience – thinking and feeling.  While we may find ourselves spontaneously experiencing either or both, to actually practice empathy requires us to intentionally engage these potentials.  In other words, the practice of empathy is the conscious choice to try understanding and/or feeling what another person thinks and/or feels.  It’s that simple!  Yet, as simple as the explanation is, the application can be more complicated, and it has a number of dimensions that can be attended to and refined.  Rather than go into a more lengthy examination of those dimensions, for now I prefer to offer some steps to actually develop our abilities to empathize.  We’re going to focus primarily on empathy for the feelings of others, because most of us get much less training and practice with this in Western culture than we do with paying attention to and understanding the thoughts of others.

Step One: Perception and Identification

This step requires that we turn our attention toward the experience of another person with the intention of identifying the thoughts and feelings the person is having.  This requires not only listening to what the person says, but also paying attention to facial expressions, gestures, posture, and other non-verbals or “body language.”  At this point, the aim is not to analyze, critique, or judge the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the person, but to try recognizing them as clearly as if they were our own.  Such recognition in thinking includes the ability to accurately restate the other person’s thoughts, but in our own words.   It also includes the ability to understand how one idea connects with another in that person’s chain of thoughts.  In feeling, empathic recognition includes the ability to actually experience some degree of the sensations or emotions of the other person.  Empathic thought and feeling begin to combine when we not only share in the feelings of another, but we are also able to name those feelings and understand how they are related to the other’s thoughts.

Step Two: Enhancing Perception and Identification

For this step, I suggest you try an experiment, and that you repeat it often.  During your ordinary daily activities, find times to carefully observe another human being.  The person might be someone you live with, a stranger out in public somewhere, or, as a last resort, someone in a movie or some other video medium.  As you observe the person, pay attention at a physical level and try to recall or imagine what it physically feels like to do whatever it is the person is physically doing. If the person is walking, call up the feeling of your feet impacting the floor or ground, the movement of your legs and arms, and so on.  If the person is talking on a phone, feel the phone in your hand, pressed to your ear, etc.  Is the person drinking a cup of coffee?  Feel all the sensations of holding the cup, smelling the coffee, and sipping the warm liquid into your mouth and swallowing it.

Once you have conducted this experiment several times, start to bring in the emotional dimension.  Listen to and watch people having emotional experiences.  As they do so, make an effort to share in those feelings to a manageable extent.  If the person is laughing, recall not only the physical sensations of laughter, but the happiness that goes with it.  When people laugh at themselves, feel the added emotional “flavor” of that experience. (We all know what that’s like!)   Similarly, seeing an angry person, imagine what that anger actually feels like.

Step Three: More Fully Integrating Empathic Thinking & Feeling

A useful tool in identifying emotions, and thus to integrating empathic feeling with empathic thinking, is building a vocabulary rich enough to distinguish subtle differences in the intensity and combinations of emotions.  There are many models and resources available for anyone interested in developing a vocabulary and understanding of emotions, each with its own appeal, but I’d like to offer Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions as a good starting point. (This model doesn’t entirely suit me, even though I find it immensely useful.  For instance, I prefer the word “affection” where Plutchik shows “love.”  I don’t agree with labeling an emotion as “love,” because love isn’t simply a function of emotion, yet it can be experienced and expressed in any emotional state.)

1000px-Plutchik-wheel.svg

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions
(Click for Expanded Image)

As you study the wheel, try to recall how each emotion actually feels, and how it affects your thinking, behavior, speech, and so on.  It may help to remember specific moments in your life when you felt each emotion.  Then, as you practice perceiving the feelings of others, use your growing vocabulary and understanding to more fully connect with their personal experiences.

Empathic thinking can be even further integrated by trying to identify what the feelings seem to be about.  What is it that’s so funny or angering?  Why is it so?  How can this feeling affect the way a person thinks and behaves?  What has it been like for me to feel and manage this emotion in my own experiences?

In working with that last question, and with the previous recommendation of recalling similar experiences of our own, we are engaging the aspect of empathy that we commonly call relating.  Relating to others can be a very helpful aspect of empathy, but it can also distract from empathy when we allow it to lead us into hasty assumptions about what others are experiencing.  It’s therefore important to be mindful that relating may offer us clues to deeper understanding of another person, but we cannot take this for granted; there is much room for error.

Step Four: Communicating Empathy

At this point, we are no longer merely observing and empathizing with another from some distance, but reflecting back to the person our effort to accurately feel and/or understand their experience.  Perhaps the most basic way of doing this is to simply state an awareness that the other person is experiencing some feeling or feelings, and ask them to speak about it.  Just these two very basic acts of empathy — (1) recognizing the fact that another is experiencing something, and then (2) opening to share in that experience — can be immensely powerful!  On the one hand, they demonstrate to the other person that we are loving them in one of the most fundamental and unconditional of ways.  On the other hand, these acts also welcome the honor of a clearer connection and deeper understanding of the other person’s experience with less potential for distortion and misunderstanding from our own assumptions.

Once an experience has been communicated to us by other persons, we then have the opportunity to test and refine our empathy for the experience.  We do this by reflecting upon it with our own words, summarizing and paraphrasing what they have said, appropriately expressing relevant emotions through our own non-verbals, and perhaps also offering some insight about the experience’s meaning in one way or another.  As they receive the reflection, they can indicate to us where our empathy is or is not accurate and helpful, and we can then work with them to gain clarity.   In this process, we may use the practice of relating their experience to our own not only to more adequately feel and understand their experience, but to reveal to them and ourselves that we have these things in common.  In other words, accurate empathic relating is a very intimate and profound way of communing, of realizing union, with other human beings.  It is one of the most beautiful ways of loving others as ourselves, and thereby more completely loving God.

Conclusion

While the practice of Christian mysticism is commonly understood to include thinking about theology and other spiritual subjects, it also has a practical dimension without which it is only a topic of academic interest, at best.  Certainly there are many forms of ritual, prayer, and meditation that come to mind for mystical practice.  Yet we should also realize that mysticism as a way of life is incomplete if it isn’t integrated into the social dimension of our everyday experiences.  The practice of empathy is one of the most meaningful ways we actualize the mystical life.

No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us. God’s love is made complete in us.We know that we belong to God and God belongs to us. God has given us the Holy Spirit.  1 John 4:12-13

Blessed_Virgin_Mary

Agape

 

Jul 032012
 

Some of us know people who despair of knowing God, maybe including ourselves from time to time.  When we are in these psychospiritual spaces, we desperately want to feel God’s presence in our hearts and minds in the way it is so often glowingly described in song, poetry, and prose, yet fear it may never come, or never return if it has come before.  Even despite our passionate faith, God can seem hopelessly remote, detached, and unconcerned.  We may lament that we want to love God, yet wonder how we can love someone or something we do not know.  At these times, it may not be helpful at all to hear that God is the Great Mystery, as we mystics so often like to say.  It is certainly true that one of the greatest tests of believers, mystics or not, is when we don’t convincingly feel, hear, or see God in any way that we can recognize.

It sometimes angers me that God seems so unconcerned with souls going through those dark nights described by St. John of the Cross, and so touchingly illustrated in the private letters of Mother Teresa.  I wonder how God can be so still and silent, so apparently unresponsive, as a soul begs in agony for some small touch of confirmation.  It is like those moments when a beloved sits impassively as the lover pleads, “Do you still love me?  Oh, my love, do you care?!  Did you ever?”  Sometimes we are even too fearful to ask, or rather so hopeless as to stop trying, though our love for the beloved remains.  I am powerfully moved by compassion and sympathy when I think of people suffering like this.  We all know what it is like to feel the absence of our beloved and even slip into the fear that our love is unrequited; it is miserable, and even fatally unbearable for some.  And yet, there are possibilities of awakening in the fact that we can and do suffer so.

Even though I had grown up in a home of strong faith, and even though I had been touched by a couple of powerful spiritual experiences in my youth, there was a time in my life when my spirituality was so riddled with anxiously feeling God’s absence that I embraced a very skeptical and even cynical agnosticism.  And while I have retained much of the “unknowing” of that time, I did ultimately realize that the word “God” addressed something very real to me.  The impetus of this realization was that rich and painful mix of desire, hope, despair, and yearning I felt for God.  It was all recognized as evidence that there was within me a kind of knowing that didn’t depend on the rational empirical approach to knowledge.  Even though I couldn’t intellectually grasp God, I still somehow knew God.   It was, and is, an intuitive knowing in the truest sense.  It is faith, and it is will.   It isn’t merely emotional, and it cannot be reduced to ego defense mechanisms.  This knowing is certainly intertwined with existential concerns, but it is not simply fantasy to cope with fears of aloneness, meaninglessness, and impermanence.  All of my thoughts and feelings about God, all my desires to know God in every possible way, were realized as aspects of my love for God, just as they would be for a human beloved.  I accepted that I was in love with God, and that my love needed no other evidence, excuses, or explanations.

Yet what relief is there in realizing one does indeed love God while that love continues to feel unrequited?  In ways, this can feel even worse!  It can be shocking to find no satisfying response from God in the wake of such a final acquiescence to the fact that one’s love for God is undeniable.   It can be so disappointing that some people give up all hope.  On the other hand, we might ask if there is something God would have us learn through this suffering, or rather what meaning we might find in it.  At the very least it can develop one’s compassion for others suffering in this way.  For some of us it may also build strength and self-reliance, and perhaps even facilitate self-realization and self-actualization.  In these ways, God’s silence may be for us like the apparent coldness of a mother bear ignoring her young, forcing them to leave her and get on with their lives.  It is as if God is saying, “Stop expecting me to make everything safe, comfortable, and meaningful for you.  It’s your life to live, and I’ve given you the freedom to make of it what you will, so go on and live it.”  Or is this God’s way of encouraging us to actively love God in and through relationships with other creatures rather than keeping our attentions turned within the cloisters of our own souls?  Perhaps that is one among many ways we can become more sensitive to God’s presence, if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear.  It is in that vein that I want to share another avenue of meaning that opened for me.

One day in early autumn of 2006, I was musing on this whole issue, and after the briefest pause of contemplative silence these words of St. Francis struck me anew:  “You are that which you are seeking.”  The following poem came out of that moment:

This Yearning Itself

Today, Mysterious Lord,
for you pours out this pining.
It is a sweet grieving.

As though for a dear father
who has left this world,
or a lost first love,
your memory haunts me.

Reaching out to embrace you
these arms enfold emptiness
and wrap themselves
back upon this burning heart.

Yet here you are
in this very melancholy,
the darkness in waiting,
and the longing light,
this yearning itself.

Our feelings of love for God, even the most painful ones, are evidence of the Holy Spirit stirring in our souls!   With further meditation, it struck me how well that fit with St. John’s assertion that God is love.  I realized I was in love with Love Itself, and that every experience of love was therefore in some way, to some degree, an experience of God, a mystical experience.  So, in November of that same year, I tried to express this awakening with the following prose, which I have at times called my manifesto:

After all these years in the study and practice of philosophy, psychology, and other crystallizations of human knowledge, after thousands of meditations and prayers, and countless dreams in both night and day, I have fallen in love with Love. After so long lightly kissing Her hand with the lip service of sophistication, I find myself reeling head over heels into the grand romance, to be seduced by the sacred Lover that is Love and Light and Life Herself. For long enough now, I have been coy with Love and settled for fascination with Her many adornments – the jewels of science that rest upon Her flawless breast, the silky rainbow of arts that are the garments veiling Her blinding perfection. I long to no longer fear being a fool for Love, and I wish to abandon myself in Her, for She is the essence of all wisdom. All the most precious sentiments and noble passions stirring in our hearts, all the most illuminating ideas within our minds, are these not the echoes of Her holy voice?

The great virtues of body, mind and spirit are nothing more than reflections of Love’s transcendent beauty. No mortal can hope to cultivate or command Her, for She is the Supreme Virtue to whom we can only surrender and serve. No mystic realizes union with the Divine but through Love’s unfathomable grace. St. Paul was right that faith, hope and even miraculous works are nothing without Her. Yet few of us are able to keep the eyes of our souls upon Her at all times, with all people, in all things. In our moments of failing vision, faith and hope are means by which we open ourselves to once again fall into the immediacy of Love’s embrace. To have faith in each other, to trust, to give our fidelity, to have hope for our mutual benefit, to cultivate optimism and confidence that together we can give birth to peace and joy, are these not the caresses of Her fingertips?

Join me and let us be lovers of Love. Let us find Her even in those we might hate for their ignorance and fear of Her. Let us sacrifice our own ignorance and fear that we might see Love’s singular light even in the distorted reflections we call evil. In Love we need not conquer or destroy, but nurse all harm into healing, and nurture all suffering as the pains of rebirth.  Join me and let us be lovers of Love.

The fall of 2006, the surrender as it were, wasn’t the end of my spiritual and existential struggles and suffering.  Sometimes I still feel a profound sense of frustration when I don’t experience Love’s love the way I want it – warm, reassuring, nurturing, tender, affectionate, uplifting, inspiring – but now I am more likely to patiently attend to these times, knowing that they too are moments of communing with the Holy Spirit.  I hope you might know this as well.

Agape

Jun 252012
 

Seeking a God to Glorify, by Leroy T. Howe

Glorify coverHere is what I wrote for Amazon.com:

“This book is a wonderful read! Dr. Howe guides us through his own journey of spiritual formation, or faith development, courageously sharing the kinds of deep questions, thoughts, and feelings that many of us have been trained to avoid and deny at all costs. Supported by his exceptional scholarship, Dr. Howe’s thinking is as penetrating and clear as his compassion for humanity is warm and accepting. This soulful combination allows him to voice great sympathy for the profound struggles of religious life, especially with church doctrine, while also permitting him to be both funny and surgically precise in criticizing a great deal of popular dogma. Personally speaking, at every turn I felt as though I was reading the thoughts and feelings of a true kindred spirit. Dr. Howe knows the only god truly worthy of worship is the God who is Truth and Love. This being the highest possible concept of God, we best honor God through our own genuine commitment to the principles of truth and love, and so we must seriously question any doctrine, text, or authority that leads elsewhere.”

With regard to mysticism, Dr. Howe speaks clearly of a world-shifting spiritual experience  in which he felt connection with an infinitely caring “Knower.”  He also alludes to exploring some methods of spiritual practice, yet he never labels his faith as mystical.   Even so, many of us will find that his work belies a truly meditative depth of reflection, if not a genuinely contemplative openness to the still small voice of the Spirit in his own heart and mind.   One of the nice things about the lack of the mysticism label, combined with his personable writing style, is that it illustrates an approach to communing very deeply with God to which almost anyone can relate.

Dr. Howe also has his own excellent blog: Faith Challenges – Searching for a Credible Faith.

As a more intimate note to readers of my blog, I’m happy to point out that Dr. Howe dedicated this book to his good friend, Dr. John F. Miller, III.  John was my philosophy professor in college, my first meditation teacher, has remained a mentor all these years, and is one of my dearest friends.  Given that John’s career as a philosopher is most noteworthy for championing love above all else, it’s no surprise to me that Dr. Howe would dedicate this book to him.

Jun 082012
 

Part 3: Applied Ethics

In the Present Day

There are a number of common situations in which some of us modern Christians fall back on an attitude of “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”   I’ve heard it used with reference to vices of all sorts, to addictions, acts of violence, and even to identifying as other than Christian.   In terms of public discourse, perhaps the most noteworthy context these days is that of romantic love between persons of the same sex or gender, which we shall refer to under the shorthand term of gay love.*

There are various reasons we’re taking the issue of gay love as the case in point:

First, it is an issue where judgment of sin is clearly a common practice among Christians.  A recent survey says that 71% of weekly church-going Americans, and 82% of “evangelical, fundamentalist or born again Christians,” consider gay love to be sinful, as compared to 44% of all Americans.

Second, as with many other issues, traditional doctrines based on certain scriptures are typically used to try justifying the judgment of sin.**

Third, this issue can be quite a flashpoint. The attitude of many Christians is the most passionate example of hate in “hate the sin,” while the love in “love the sinner”fred-phelps-westboro-baptist is too often at best merely pity and squeamish or begrudging tolerance. Furthermore, the message of hate can so far outweigh the message of love that some of us seem to think it is our duty to God to be hostile on this issue.  The words that come from the mouths of this hateful Christian “love” encourage intentional emotional abuse, and too often even explicitly advocate physical violence.  Is any of that what Jesus taught?

This issue clearly shows that the ethic of separating out the sin to be hated while loving the sinner eventually falls in upon itself.  The faulty cornerstone of our presumption to judge sin for others makes the entire edifice unsafe to inhabit.   As Jesus taught, and the Apostles rediscovered for themselves, this is not the way to serve and minister to others, or to build a community of faith, hope, peace, and love.

In the Early Church

When it came to the matter of other people’s sins, Jesus’ love repeatedly reached across the traditional barriers of his time.  Even so, in the early times after Jesus we find the Apostles deeply troubled in working out how to love as Jesus loved.  They were concerned about who was and was not worthy of Christian love, and how that love should or should not be expressed.  There was friction among them about whether or not a Gentile could be considered a sibling in Christ, and this friction was based upon the purity codes in scripture and Jewish tradition.  Devout Jews of the time regarded it sinful merely to associate with “impure” people, let alone treat them as equals in the sight of God.  To do so was to invite both social and legal consequences, and was even considered an invitation for God’s wrath.   To me, that sounds a lot like where many of us Christians are today on the issue of gay love.

Despite their fear, the Apostles finally let go of this sweeping judgment against their Gentile neighbors.  One of the most significant moments in this transformation occurs when Peter received two visions that led him to say:

God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.  Acts 10:28

Notice that he didn’t say, “God told me to welcome you despite your impurity,” which would be more like “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”   Rather, he accepted the mystical experience of his dreams and visions, the Holy Spirit moving within him, and dropped his old scripturally-backed judgment.  He was then able to more freely love the soul kneeling before him, asking the man to rise and be greeted as an equal.   In doing so, he mirrored the attitudes and behaviors of the one he called Lord.  He let go of the judgment of sin, and loved the soul.

This practice of letting go of judgment, particularly with regard to the purity codes, grew rapidly among early Christians.  It accompanied a significant evolution in the understanding of sin.  With time, many prohibitions for the ancient people of Israel were no longer even regarded as matters of sin, and that progression has not stopped.  We have also increasingly realized that such purity codes actually serve more as obstacles than aids to spreading the Good News and uniting all people as one family in God’s unconditional love.  As this progression rolls on,”hate the sin, but love the sinner” should become less and less relevant to Christian life.  We are increasingly letting go of the judgment of sin, and instead focusing on loving the soul.

A Closing Thought

Jesus and his followers exemplified this point many times over: If we want God’s loving will “done on earth as it is in Heaven,” then we best serve that aim with a love that welcomes others as equals, respects their freedom, and promotes peace.   In short, it’s all so simple:  We reap what we sow.   That’s also a pretty good tenet to keep in mind!

Agape

 

* The term gay love is used here because it acknowledges that people of the same sex or gender can and do love each other in every way.  When looking into our own hearts and minds, many of us who are straight have found that the term “homosexual” has been associated with a tendency to focus only on the sexual desires and behaviors of gay people.  This is dehumanizing and unfair.  How many of us routinely refer to the romantic love between straight people as “heterosexuality” or even “straight love”?  I pray for the day when everyone will wonder why there would be a need to routinely classify romantic love in such ways.

** For now, it would be a distraction to question the traditional understandings of those scriptures, and thus challenge the idea that gay love is sinful.  It is enough to note in passing that Biblical scholars, theologians, clergy, ordinary laypersons, and even entire Christian communities are increasingly doing so, just as was done with interracial love in the previous century.

Jun 072012
 

Part 2: Beyond Proof-Texting

In this part I want to offer more of my own reflections on this attitude of “hate the sin and love the sinner,” and do so in light of what I believe are the New Testament messages underpinning Christian ethics:

  • Love God with all that we are.
  • Love others as ourselves, and even as Christ in their forms.
  • Because God’s love for humans is a matter of grace, not of merit, we cannot judge anyone’s worthiness of love.

In this context, loving the sinner while hating the sin seems possible and even praiseworthy.  Most of us know very well that we can truly love someone while strongly disliking and disapproving of some attitude or action from that person.   We recognize that occasional sinful acts can be severely hated, yet even when added together not be enough to warrant our utter hatred for a person who’s character is basically good.   In fact, we might even more strongly hate the sin because of our love for the sinner.  Yet, while there are other merits to this saying, this line of reasoning reveals its shortcomings as a guide for Christian ethics.  It falls short because it does not mirror the unconditional nature of Divine Love.  “Hate the sin, but love the sinner” continues to be based upon human judgment and limited ideas about the nature of love.

These obstacles are understandable because human beings seem to rarely express the transcendent unconditional love that is the Divine Love of God’s grace.  Furthermore, we usually have some sort of social and moral grading for portioning out our love, and thus our love is often a commodity that we trade with some degree of judgment.  Most of us even routinely speak of love and hate as if they are opposites, as if there really is no such thing as a love that hate cannot match or even outweigh.

It would be unreasonable to expect ourselves to be anything but human, and thus we can accept that our love will sometimes be conditional.  We will sometimes miss the mark by judging how others might miss the mark with God.  We will overlook the logs in our own eyes as we become obsessed with splinters in the eyes of others.  We will often put our faith in our own judgment of sin, and in lesser forms of love, rather than completely trust in Divine Wisdom and Love.

In these moments, it is helpful to have a guide for opening as much as possible to unconditional love.  Surely this is the best intention behind “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  However, given the very human tendencies we’ve reviewed, as well as the difficulty in mentally separating the sin from the person who commits it, we can see how “hate the sin, but love the sinner” could actually encourage us to keep hate in our hearts and hold it against our love for the person.

Yet we are challenged to allow God’s unconditional love to shine through us as best we can, and so there must be other options for tenets that can carry us further in that direction.  I want to offer this as one possibility:

Let go of the judgment of sin, and love the soul.

In one sense, this statement is an affirmation to help with releasing the tendency to judge sin.  It acknowledges the possibility of being judgmental, but it does not promote an unrealistic expectation of some idealized perfection.  It is also a guide for our attitudes and actions whenever we awaken to the fact that we are judging what we consider to be the sins of another.   Its aims are also served by not using the word “sinner,”  and instead using the word “soul.”  In this way, we have a reminder that the other is not only more than a sinner, but also more than a person we know in this world (person comes from the Greek prosopon, meaning “mask”).  It reminds us that this soul, this whole being with depths and dimensions we cannot see, is a child of God.

In Part 3, we’ll review issues where “hate the sin, but love the sinner” is often applied, and some detriments of doing so. We’ll also reflect on how the proposed alternative could produce attitudes, actions, and effects more in line with the core ethics of the Good News.

Jun 062012
 

I’m offering these reflections in three parts.  First, we’ll take a look at the history of this saying.  Second, we’ll evaluate it in the context of the Good News as I understand it, and consider an alternative that I think better serves the spirit of Christ’s call.  Finally, we’ll address one of the ways this saying is frequently applied, how it is problematic, and how the suggested alternative could be beneficial.

Part 1: Some Background

Many contemporary Christians, including me, have spoken this statement, or some variation of it, as if it is traditional doctrine, if not actually scriptural.   In fact, it is neither, although there are scriptural references that might be used to support it, such as these:

Love must be sincere.  Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Romans 12:9

Show mercy to those who doubt. Pull others out of the fire. Save them.  To others, show mercy mixed with fear.  Hate even the clothes that are stained by the sins of those who wear them.  Jude 22-23

So what is the source of this supposed doctrine?  The earliest known approximation of the modern version comes from St. Augustine of Hippo. In a letter counseling quarreling nuns, he said: Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum. (Opera Omnia, Vol II. Col. 962, #211) This statement actually translates as “with love of persons and hatred of sins.”  Notice that it doesn’t refer to those persons by the term “sinners.”  The contemporary saying is also misattributed to Mohandas Gandhi, who only reflected upon it in his autobiography.  As far as I know, the first English statement of “hate the sin, but love the sinner” appears in Edward Irving’s book, Sermons, Lectures, and Occasional Discourses, Volume 1 (1828), pp. 131-132:

“It is a vain thing to say that God loveth sinners and ungodly creatures: he extendeth mercy and grace unto them, and loveth the election for his Son’s sake; but he must cease to love his Son – that is, to love himself – when he loveth those who are rebellious against himself.  He is “angry with the wicked every day:” he cannot look upon the workers of iniquity but with detestation and abhorrence. It is one of the sayings of that wretched Arminianism, with which the land is overflowed, ‘Hate the sin, but love the sinner.’  What mean they? That sin is something by itself, and the sinner something by himself, so distinct from one another, that the one may well be hated, and the other may well be loved?  They know nothing at all, and they will know nothing at all.”

To some extent, I agree that sin and sinner are inseparable, but that is about as far as my agreement with Irving goes.   It seems clear that he is trying to justify hatred toward those we would judge as sinners, and yet even his logic diverts from his own assertion that God extends mercy and grace to sinners.  What are mercy and grace if not expressions of love?  His reasoning also falters in concluding that it is hateful toward oneself to love those who rebel against you.    Does every mother who loves a rebellious child therefore hate herself?  To me, this position is absurd, makes love sound petty, and casts God as terribly small.

The Christian scriptural basis of Irving’s argument is also questionable.  His only scriptural quotation, “angry with the wicked every day,” is from Psalm 7:11, but there are so many things attributed directly to Jesus and his apostles that contradict the way he is using it.  For example, he would have a very hard time reconciling his position with Jesus’ very clear instruction to “love your enemies.”  Furthermore, in Romans 5:6-10, we actually find a powerful refutation of Irving’s argument:

For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

Let’s not get mired in a scriptural duel, parrying and thrusting with passages taken out of context.  That would be a distraction from the most important point of this series, which is to suggest a different approach to Christian ethics than “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  In Part 2, I will therefore deal with this matter in light of what I believe to be the central moral themes of the Good News.

May 232012
 

(Some of us at ChristianMystics.com have recently been talking about Rev. Brian Robertson, who could be called the founder of our community.   I liked Brian’s forthright and unapologetic style, even if it was more confrontational than my own.  But I found myself inspired to write something that, somewhere along the line, caused me to chuckle as I realized I was reminding myself of Brian.  So, this one’s for you, Brian, wherever you are.)

That’s right, love is more important than Jesus.  Do you find that shocking?  Do you find it blasphemous?  I can understand if you do, but everything in my heart and mind tells me Jesus would agree.  Sure, there are words attributed to Jesus that make it sound like believing in him is the most important thing.  But what does it really mean to believe in him?  Does it mean to confess his name and praise him with our words and prayers?  Does believing in him mean going to church, tithing, and learning the Bible? Does it mean accepting particular theological doctrines about him as truths?

What does Jesus say it means to believe in him?  In my view, there should be no need to quote chapter and verse here.  It should be common knowledge among Christians that Jesus taught believing in him means doing as he did, loving as he loved.  When asked what the greatest law was, he didn’t talk about having historical knowledge or theological understandings of him; he simply and concisely talked about love.  When he talked about the judgment day, he didn’t say the sheep welcomed into Heaven’s fold would be those who called out his name and confessed him as savior; he said they would be those who genuinely, and thus actively, cared for others.

With all of this in mind, it makes sense to me that knowing the heart of Jesus, knowing the love that his followers said is God, is more important than knowing the story or name of Jesus of Nazareth.  Actually, in the deepest sense, love is his name and his story.  The extent to which our hearts are awakened to love is the extent to which we are one with the heart of Jesus; it is the extent to which his spirit lives in and through us, no matter what name we give to that spirit.  There is nothing about Christian mysticism more important to me than this.

Maranatha

Agape

Mar 092012
 

from Lenten meditations

Oh you who live the religious life,
if you persevere a time may come
when you finally realize
that all your performance of ritual,
all your prayer and meditation,
all your sacrifices and alms,
all your fasting and service,
have not of themselves
washed away your sinfulness,
made you a better person,
or endeared you more to God.
You will see that none of it
has brought more healing
to your wounded heart
or light to your searching mind,
let alone to the world around you.

If you do not fight or flee this realization,
you may yet come to see
why it is that others before you
have continued in these ways,
as if poets writing poems soon forgotten,
dancers dancing when no one else watches,
or whistlers whistling without thought.
Perhaps then will you begin to know
the true depths of cleansing,
virtue, endearment, healing, and illumination
that were there all along,
already flowing in and through you
and all the world.

Feb 112012
 

One thing I find extremely interesting is how Jesus is most typically portrayed in Western religious art, and especially in previous generations.  He is soft, thin, gentle; our kind teacher and merciful healer.  According to our contemporary stereotypes, he is remarkably effeminate!

Jesus meek and mild 1 Jesus meek and mild 2 Jesus meek and mild 5

Granted these are ethnically inaccurate pictures, and they aren’t typical in the Orthodox tradition, but they are the norm in the West for both Protestants and Catholics.  In any case, this pacifist, inclusive, forgiving, emotional, penniless Jesus, apparently also without spouse or child, hardly provides a respectable role model for the stereotypical macho American male.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am not saying this is the only way Jesus should ever be portrayed.   It’s important that we not ignore the Jesus who was a hardworking builder’s son, who stormed the temple, who boldly called people out for their hypocrisy, who didn’t run from his accusers.  Certainly there is a lot of dynamic and assertive strength in the Son of Man, not that those are uniquely masculine qualities.

What I mean to do is pose some questions: What has happened to that old iconic image in the mind of modern Americans, especially men?  How would most American Christians respond to a man like the traditional Jesus shown above appearing today and claiming to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life?  How have so many of us come to ignore the nobility of Jesus as a man who was heroic in large part because he refused the role of warrior?

It’s quite clear that many of us Christians prefer the vision of Christ portrayed in the Book of Revelation, the Divine warrior-king who comes to swing a sword (or pull a trigger, or drop a bomb) against all those who aren’t on the “right team.”  But is that image one we should emulate?

apocalyptic christ

That picture of Christ is as the Lord of Vengeance that many Christians have hoped and prayed would come in their lifetimes.  This is the Christ who seems prophesied to violently defeat all those who have not repented and accepted him as Master, and to extract even more than eye for eye and tooth for tooth from those who have opposed the faithful.   It’s not my purpose here to refute that vision of Christ’s return, but to point out that (even if its literal reading is an accurate portrayal of the Second Coming) intolerance, vengeance, hostility, and violence are nonetheless not what Jesus calls for in the meantime.  Instead, he teaches the exact opposite. (Matthew 5; Luke 6:17-49)  We are therefore not to make the warrior-king Christ of Armageddon a model for Christian life, let alone a model for masculinity.

So the last question I want to pose is this:  How would our society, and the world, be different if we fully celebrated and emulated the Jesus of the Gospels as a role model for masculinity?

Please do not consider these questions to be merely rhetorical.  I really am interested in your responses.

Agape

Jan 202012
 

As part of my current religious practices, I am charged with praying a daily office, consisting of morning and evening prayer periods with specified scriptures, prayers, chants, etc.  The Psalms are central to most traditional offices, and obviously almost all of Christianity makes use of the Psalms in some way.  While many parts of the Psalms are quite beautiful, inspiring, and comforting, there are others that I have long found disturbing and even contradictory to the biblical warmessages of Jesus as I currently understand them.  Of course, this is true not only of my reading of the Psalms but also of other writings in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; I am nevertheless most frequently presented with this challenge by this particular book attributed to King David.   I explicitly refer to King David because he was a warrior king who clearly saw bloodshed as a legitimate way to serve God.  As I dig into these issues, please keep in mind that nothing I say here is meant to denigrate the Jewish people or their scriptures or traditions, but merely to reflect upon how I am challenged by those scriptures as a member of a faith that preserves its historical connections with them.

Here is an example of such passages:

In your unfailing love, silence my enemies; destroy all my foes, for I am your servant. Psalm 143:12

So I ask myself, how can I reconcile with such a prayer, let alone actually speak it, when I have received this teaching from Jesus?

But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Luke 6:27-29

I could simply refuse to speak such words as in Psalms 143:12, and at times I have done so.  There are Christians who essentially ignore the Old Testament because they regard too much of it as incompatible with their understanding of Jesus.  The rejection of scriptures that beg for or seem to command hatred and violence toward others is, to me, a completely understandable response to the teachings of Jesus about agape.  However, that approach also concerns me because I sense in it the slippery slope of denial about who we are as the Church, which includes where we came from and how we got to where we are.  For me to deny that violence and ill-will toward our fellow human beings is part of the Church’s past would be just as misguided as me trying to deny the racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes of my youth simply because I want to be free of them now and in the future.  For this reason alone I can find value in frequently revisiting these scriptures, and so when I speak them it is not to voice their literal meanings but to acknowledge them as part of our history and thus part of our present and our future.   That kind of mindfulness is meaningful to me because I’ve found truth in this adage from George Santayana:  Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Thankfully there are other benefits to maintaining my connection with even the most disturbing of scriptures.  At times I have found it a meaningful connection with the fact that I do sometimes feel anger and fear toward others and then, despite my best intentions, perhaps even fantasize about a violent intervention that would forever end the threat. On other occasions it has seemed helpful to think of these scriptures as speaking about the enemies I perceive in my own soul, vices that lead me to do things I regret, and about which I grow impatient and angry with myself.  Yet whether the perceived threat is external or internal, I believe that hatred and violence is not the answer. In those moments, scriptures like these can help me accept and integrate those dark thoughts and feelings and more carefully ponder the perceived threat and discern a more loving response.

Harsh scriptures also help me to empathize with those Christians, Jews, and Muslims who feel compelled by scripture to take a more dogmatic, legalistic, or militant approach in their religion.  I am further reminded of how the Bible and other spiritual writings, such as creeds and liturgies, are very much human texts, and how even the most illuminated prophets cannot help but respond to Divine inspiration in ways that are more or less affected by countless cultural and personal factors.  I strive to remember that this must also be true of my own understanding of life and the Divine, and so I try to not allow myself the conceit of feeling superior to those who “just don’t get it” the way I think I do.

In discussing this matter with a friend, it was further suggested to me that Judaism’s own awareness and struggle with such scriptures has been invaluable to the development of their culture’s social justice movements.  The spirit behind the warrior-like words of Psalms can be taken as  a combination of pleas to God and zealous determination to right wrongs, protect the weak, defend the innocent, free the oppressed, and support the righteous.  We Christians inherited that spirit from our Jewish forebears. There is a parallel to this transformation of historical messages within Christianity as well, where once hateful and bloodthirsty orders of Christian knighthood have been reconstructed as peaceful orders of service to all humanity.  I am fully aware that their existence is offensive to many people, especially those whose ancestors suffered the Crusades.  Yet, in what I personally consider to be the best examples of such orders, rather than deny or celebrate the heinous parts of their history, they acknowledged them with humility and remorse. The sword that was once an instrument of conquest and oppression has become a symbol for courageous commitment to Truth and a reminder that intolerance and violence too often only beget more intolerance and violence.

In terms of what most people typically think of as mystical experience, the practice of reciting such scriptures doesn’t seem to do much for me.   For that sort of thing, I’ll take the Rosary, the Jesus Prayer, chanting Maranatha, or sitting in centering prayer over reciting the Psalms any day.  This practice has, however, obviously helped me to become more aware of my place in the family of the Church, the “Mystical Body of Christ,” and to feel more compassion for and communion with all Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  And since I believe any awareness of love is an awareness of the Divine, then in that sense I must acknowledge that this practice, even with all its operational and discursive distractions, is mystical in its own way.

Maranatha

Agape