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Each week during our fall pledge campaign [Sep 30-Nov 18] I reflect on a different aspect of love, guided by Scripture and quotations from literature or from prominent figures in history.
Learning to love other people can be one of the most challenging exercises we undertake as Christians. Our Lord’s mandate is pretty straightforward—love one another as I have loved you—so we can’t claim we don’t understand it. And Scripture tells us repeatedly to love one another—nearly a dozen times—so we can’t say that we somehow overlooked this commandment in passing. The directive is thus clear—but difficult.
We’re living at a time in our nation’s history when many, many people seem to have tossed this commandment out the window, and adopted “hate one another” or “distrust one another” instead. So we followers of Jesus are trying to obey his already difficult commandment in a societal climate that is making the already-difficult even more-so. What’s a Christian to do?
We might start with praying for our own hearts; that God might increase our understanding and our compassion. In his book “Letters to a Young Poet”, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essences, something helpless that wants our love.” [1] Rilke is making the point that compassion is born out of imagining the other as one in need of love. That need may be buried deep beneath layers of bad behavior, meanness, manipulation—even violence. But it is there, somewhere, an empty cup crying out to be filled.
We may not be able to fill it, but we can honor the pain of the emptiness it presents, and from that, have compassion. A blog I sometimes visit suggests that when trying to love a difficult other, we might work to resist our natural tendency to avoid the person, and instead move toward them and find ways to interact with them. The article suggests we find specific ways to bless and encourage the one whom we find difficult, and that we pray for them. The article also reminds us that we each are that “difficult person” whom someone else finds challenging to love. [2]
We can embrace this counsel but still struggle to figure out what exactly it might look like to “act with beauty and courage”. I think often it means acting in a way that is so counter to popular culture, prevailing wisdom, or accepted practice that it stuns (in a good way) those who witness it. You may have heard over the weekend about two politicians in rural Vermont who recently acted in a loving way that stunned those who witnessed it—and made the national news!
Lucy Rogers (D) and Zac Mayo (R) are running for the Vermont State House of Representatives. Both candidates are described as really invested in the race and wanting to win, and indeed each has vowed to knock on all 2,000 doors in their rural district. Both candidates have very different views about how much government is enough. It’s a competitive race and you’d think it would be the perfect recipe for vitriol.
The two candidates met head to head for a debate—a town hall kind of gathering at their local library. At the end of the evening, the two asked the audience to give them a few moments, and then, to the amazement of all present, Rogers took up her cello and Mayo his guitar and together they played a duet. They wanted to make the point that there is a better way to do politics, and indeed, life.
Christians know this better way as the way of love. CBS News reported seeing homes in that Vermont district with signs in their windows supporting both candidates, and called this race “a landslide victory for civility”. [3] When you think about it, our call as Christians is to live in such a way—to act with beauty and courage whenever we can—so that one observing might describe it as a landslide victory for love.
God finds ways to highlight this and encourage us along the path. Parishioners Ray and Margot LaPanse just returned from a trip to Greece and there they visited the Catholic Cathedral Church of St John the Baptist in Fira, Greece, on the island of Santorini. They gave me their permission to share these photos with you—evidence, in my book, that God in Christ is always, always pointing us back toward love. The first photo shows the sun coming through a stained glass window and briefly illumining a banner hanging in the church. Pretty, but by itself nothing that unusual: observant folks will note the same thing happens at St John’s at certain times of the year.
It’s what is printed on the banner that makes the breath catch in the throat. Proof, I believe, that God too acts with beauty and courage, in ways that stun those of us who witness.
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