THE NEW COMMANDMENT
May 10, 2010
But
if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true
to the thought of God I was meant to embody, I shall be full of
God’s actuality and find God everywhere in myself, and find
myself nowhere. I shall be lost in God: that is, I shall find
myself. I shall be “saved.”
~ Thomas Merton,
New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 37
In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples: “Now is the
Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is
glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and God
will glorify him at once. . . . I give you a new commandment:
love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love
one another.” (John 13: 31-2, 34) The acts of love that
constitute each moment of the life, and now the impending death,
of Jesus are acts of God. So the “new commandment” is new only
in its recognition of the source of the love whereby
the Disciples are to love one another. That is, their love for
each other is the love of Jesus for each of them and through
them to others.
Despite our ready acknowledgement of the centrality of
love in our lives, our actual life experience, especially our
lives in relationship to others, is always reminding us of how
difficult it is to love others. So much of life in relationship
is a life of reaction. When we experience being liked or
confirmed by others, we feel a kinship with them and affinity
for them. When the other is difficult or antagonistic, we react
with anger, resentment, dismissal and distance. We experience
care for those who are “ours” or who depend on us and evoke our
sympathy, but we experience fear of and aggression toward those
whom we experience as strange or difficult. In this respect,
one of the most difficult sayings of the gospels for us is:
If you love those who love you, what thanks
can you expect? Even
sinners love those who love them.
And if you do good to those who do good to you, what
thanks can you expect?
For even sinners do that much. . . . Instead, love your enemies
and do good, and lend without any hope of return.
(Luke 6: 32-35)
For the pre-transcendent dimensions of human life, this
“command” of Jesus is impossible. This is not the love that we
speak of, think about, write about and declare to those who are
most important to us. It is something very different, and the
difficulty of its practice points to the fact that the life and
the love described in the gospels is, in many respects, quite
foreign to us in our daily experience. If we deeply reflect on
our experience of relating to other human persons, we might
begin to appreciate that, in fact, we, as we ordinarily take
ourselves to be, are incapable of such a love. Perhaps such
love is only possible by an act of transcendent willing, by
means of the love with which God has loved us (John 17: 26).
Adrian Van Kaam speaks of love in this transcendent sense
in the following way:
Love, in a supreme transcendent sense,
becomes. . . the simple will to love in the midst of utter
detachment. This love-will or purgated willfulness or
appreciative abandonment represents the basic consent of our
whole person to any consonant appeal in our formation field. . .
. This innermost choice is always rooted in our basic option to
trust in the love-will of the mystery for us. (Transcendent
Formation, p. 21)
Love, in the conventional sense, involves a positive
reaction to someone or something that appeals to us in both
senses of the term: it is gratifying or appealing to us, and it
asks something of us to which we desire to respond. On the
other hand, love in the “supreme transcendent sense” occurs “in
the midst of utter detachment.” We hear the appeal of the
person or situation regardless of its appealing or unappealing
nature. This is possible only when our own willfulness has been
purged, and we are present to the moment in appreciative
abandonment. As Merton puts it, “I shall be full of God’s
actuality and find God everywhere in myself, and find myself
nowhere.”
In van Kaam’s understanding, when
we live in consonance with our own founding form our will is a
manifestation of God’s will, or what he calls God’s
love-will. This consonance with our founding form requires
living in “utter detachment,” that is, it requires that, in
Merton’s terms, I find myself in my actuality by becoming “lost
in God.” In his Counsels to a Religious on How to Reach
Perfection, St. John of the Cross writes: “In order to
practice the first counsel, concerning resignation, you should
live in the monastery as though no one else were in it . . .”
St. John recognizes that our secondary foundational life form,
the alternative construction of our identity, is created through
conformity to and comparison and competition with others. This
secondary form of life is built up over the course of a lifetime
and its feelings and reactions are the result of our entire life
experience. Thus, our experience of others is never a direct
experience of their unique identity but a construction out of
our memories and past experiences. In this sense, our will to
love is never simple; it is rather the result of what Sigmund
Freud called transference. We react to the other based
on the hopes, fears, needs, desires and resentments of a
lifetime that the other person (as a reminder of those from our
past) evokes in us. The practice of solitude to which St. John
calls us is the practice of detaching from the deformative
dispositions of heart that our past experiences have created in
us. It is a forsaking of the biases of our secondary form of
life in favor of the capacity of our transcendent will to serve
as an instrument of the love-will of God in the face of the
appeal of the given moment.
When St. John
calls on us to live in the world as if “no one else were in it,”
he is not calling us to solipsism, for he knows that when we
detach from the ties that bind us to others in comparison,
competition, resentment, and need, we create a space in which to
know directly God’s love and God’s will in and for us. Detached
from our life of reaction to the world, we can know our deepest
potency to receive God’s love-will for us and to express it in
our own unique way. The alternative to living a life of
reaction, one that constrains our freedom to love in the way
each moment calls for, is to live a life in the presence of God.
Brother Lawrence of the
Resurrection, a seventeenth-century lay Carmelite, practiced
such a life in a way that is simple and available to all of us.
At each moment throughout his daily life, Brother Lawrence
maintained an ongoing discourse with God. In the classic text
The Practice of the Presence of God a simple but
striking example is offered. Brother Lawrence who was lame and
felt most incompetent in business affairs was asked to make a
journey by boat to buy wine. He spoke to God of his fears and
misgivings and reminded God “that it was God’s business he was
on” and went ahead to accomplish his task. Brother Lawrence
thus turns all that is within his heart and mind into a direct
and open conversation with God. Such living in open
communication and communion with God slowly but inexorably
detaches us from our falseness and pretensions. It leads to a
purgation of that willfulness that arises in us as we attempt to
assert into the world our own mistaken and false sense of
identity and opens us in appreciative abandonment to the
consonant appeal that reality makes to us in the present moment.
In our daily lives the demands of love, especially as
Jesus speaks of them in the gospels, can seem beyond our
capacities. Yet, the new commandment reminds us to love as
we are loved. The power to love comes not through our own
efforts but rather through “the simple will to love in the midst
of utter detachment.” As we live more and more in appreciative
abandonment of the love-will of God in our own and the world’s
regard, we become channels of that love in each of the moments
of our lives.
