Love of Neighbor and Transcendent Openness
June 21, 2010
For
I desire goodness, not sacrifice;
Obedience to God, rather than burnt offerings.
~ Hosea 6:6
In the passage from the works of Oswald Chambers that is quoted
for June 19 in My Utmost for His Highest, we read: “If
I am devoted to the cause of humanity only, I will soon be
exhausted and come to the place where my love will falter; but
if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve
humanity though human beings treat me as a doormat.” The
longer one lives the more one identifies with the experience of
Linus in Charles Schultz’s famous comic strip Peanuts:
“I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The truth of the
matter is that for all our attempts to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to love not only our friends but also our enemies,
there are many times when we don’t like the people around us
very much. There is little doubt that for most of us the
attempt to love others who often seem to us to be careless,
mindless, selfish, arrogant, and on and on is, at best,
exhausting, if not impossible. Recently, as I entered the
security line at an airport for an eagerly anticipated trip home
both stressed and tired from a daylong meeting, I found myself
increasingly frustrated and agitated by the perceived
incompetencies of the security personnel and the slowness and
inattention of my fellow travelers. Later, on the plane, I sat
next to a young woman who proceeded to take off her shoes, cross
her legs, and dangle her bare foot in front of me for much of,
thankfully, only an hour or so flight. By the time I arrived
home, I was very tired and significantly agitated and angry.
And all this from relatively minor, if not perhaps totally
subjective, affronts. Commonplace experiences such as these are
potent reminders of how difficult it is to practice the
spiritual directives that call us to revere and love the other.
How do we, over the long haul, continue to work at loving
those who feel like obstructions and impediments to us?
According to Chambers, it is a matter of our intention. When
our heart is devoted to the love of the Lord, it becomes
possible to remain devoted to humanity, even as human beings
hurt and frustrate us. As Henri Nouwen has written, “It is
important to remember that the first great commandment is indeed
the first.” As counterintuitive as it may seem to us, it is, as
Hosea says, only through obedience to God, by loving God with
“all our heart and soul and strength” that sustained devotion to
the human world is possible. Put another way, to grow in love
for our neighbor over the course of a lifetime requires that we
take the reality of our own sinfulness seriously.
It is not by dint of will but only “in spirit and in
truth” that reverence and love for others are possible. It is
only as the bodily and functional dimensions of our personality
become suffused with the aspirations and inspirations of our
spiritual and transcendent capacities that the love of which the
great wisdom traditions speak becomes a lived possibility for
us. Any attempt to live out the call to universal love that is
based on our vital and functional capacities as separated from
our spiritual core is doomed to frustration and failure. For
when others invade my bodily space or impede my desired goal, I
become angry and resentful at them. So strong are my vital
reactions and functional frustrations that my transcendent
dimension’s capacity for awe and reverence becomes totally
submerged. As I enter the security line at the airport, my
presence is restricted to my desire to get to my
gate as quickly as possible. As I take my seat in the plane,
my goal is to be left alone and to get through the trip
with as little interference and bother as possible. Thus, I
refuse the possibilities of spirit that constitute my deepest
personhood and possibility – a possibility for an open,
respectful, and awe-filled presence to the true personal reality
of these situations.
To become ever-increasingly conformed to the will of the
Father is the true meaning of discipleship. Chambers, as well
as St. Paul, remind us that “the saving of the human race was
the natural outcome of [Jesus’] obedience to the Father”. The
intention of Jesus throughout his life was pure and simple: to
do the will of God. And by doing so, He saves us. So we too
can only live out the ethic to love through learning obedience
to God’s will, through subjecting our functional mind and will
more and more to the life and direction given to us through our
transcendent mind and will. We shall never come to experience
vital level affinity for all persons, nor shall we come to
experience even most of them as collaborators and cooperators in
common functional projects. We can, however, come to recognize
the presence of the Mystery in them which will evoke awe and
reverence in us. This will require of us, over the course of
our lives, to allow our wills to be conformed to God’s will.
This conformation to God’s will, to the Reality of all that is,
happens through our capacity for what Adrian van Kaam terms
transcendent openness.
Functional mind and will
separated from our transcendent capacities, lead us to reduce
our presence to the world and others and the Mystery that lies
at their core. On the other hand, our capacity for transcendent
openness is of its nature expansive. It draws us increasingly
beyond ourselves and the limitations our self-absorption impose
on the quality of our presence:
Each presence of the spirit implies an
expansion of our transcendent potency and a pointing to the next
phase of deepening spiritual presence. In other words, our
actual spiritual presence will inevitably give rise to a deeper
presence the moment we are ready for it culturally and
personally. The only way for us to avoid the new horizon is to
live in repressive refusal of all horizons of the spirit, to
falsify them, to dwell willfully outside the light of the
formation mystery.
We can thus distinguish a fundamental
potentiality and a concrete readiness for deepening. Only when
both coincide does a new disclosure take place.
Adrian van Kaam, Fundamental Formation,
p. 163
The obedience to which we are called and which carries with it
the dispositions of awe and reverence for others is a willing
“concrete readiness for deepening.” It requires of us a way of
living that fosters that in us which is openness to our ever
expanding capacity for spiritual presence, for living in the
light of the Divine Mystery of Formation. Disobedience, then,
is “the repressive refusal of all horizons of spirit.”
How do we recognize when we are living this “repressive
refusal” of spirit? In Matthew 7, Jesus tells us one such
symptom: noticing the splinter in the other’s eye. Jesus then
teaches: “. . . remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then
you will see clearly to remove the splinter from the other’s
eye.” (Matthew 7:5) That is, first restore your own obedience
to the will of God, reconnect with your own transcendent
openness, and then “you will see clearly” your relationship to
and the deeper appeal of the other.
The love of others to
which we are called is not merely an ethical demand of our
limited functional capacities that is doomed to exhaust us. It
is rather a life that we already share and which, if we cease to
repress it, is always available to our transcendent potencies.
. . .we are already one. But we imagine
that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original
unity.
Thomas Merton, Asian Journal, p.
308
