Some of you may remember Nobel Laureate the late Desmond Tutu preaching from this very pulpit about God’s incredible love for each and everyone of us. Especially those hurting most, and those most despised and rejected. Were not our hearts burning within us to hear his authentic simple call to love! I have that sermon on a CD. And every time I listen again to that sermon (as Jane and I did just the other day) my heart burns within me once again.
But if you’re anything like me, the flames die down all too soon. In my head I am utterly convinced that love is the way. Love is the way to healing and peace and justice. Love not argument. Love not shouting and screaming. Love not the fear that breeds hate and violence. I’m convinced of it. But I’m not very good at it. Yes, the flames die down all too soon. And my heart is too easily pried open to messages of fear and selfishness.
We get lazy at love. I often think of a cartoon so relevant to our “love laziness”. A couple is pictured in a lawyer’s office. One says to the other: I can’t believe it’s come to this. You always declared: “I love you, I love you!” The other partner replies: “I didn’t say I love you. I said Luv ya!” Yes, we get lazy at love.
In my counseling practice I often worried when premarital couples seemed starry-eyed about their relationship. Some seemed to think that their particular love was simply the first really perfect love that ever came along, the perfect match, definitely exempt from all the problems other people have. We know of course that nobody is exempt and that love is often hard work. Lazy lovers, starry eyed lovers need to beware of the junk food of love, the easy throw-away Luv-yas!
Sometimes even the Bible leaves us a bit puzzled because it says great things about love like “Love your neighbor as yourself!” But when it gets down to the messiness of life, how exactly do we make it happen?! How on earth do we KEEP the flame of love burning in our hearts when everything around us seems stacked against a world of love??!! Maybe we need a love formula to keep us from getting lost and lazy with our love! Jesus probably wasn’t much of a formula person and yet I detect a very clear LOVE FORMULA emerging from his marvelous life of love. A formula that emerges too from the lives and deeds of so many of our modern day prophets who show us how to follow the way of Jesus’s love. The formula goes like this: Deep Prayerful Listening produces Compassion which leads to Action for Justice! Deep Prayerful Listening, Compassion, Action for Justice! This formula applies to a couple working on their strained relationship. But it applies just as much to a country such as ours facing hate and division just before an election.
Deep Prayerful Listening
We start with deep prayerful listening. The kind of listening that Jesus was doing in the desert, and in the garden. The deep listening starts long before the conversation we want to have with someone. It starts in our hearts. It starts with God’s truth written in our hearts. The kind of listening that makes us honest, and makes us grateful for what we have. We go to our honest place. We gather our scattered selves into silent meditation. We can best understand this first part of love, this deep prayerful listening, by noticing how often we do the very opposite. How often we listen in a very shallow way or not at all. Think of the times you’ve been in a disagreement with someone. As they’re talking to you, you are busy preparing your next argument. But listening deeply is that quality of “presence” to another human being that is not immediately on the defensive. But is ready to try to understand. Think of the times Jesus says: What is it that you want? What do you think? What do you say? Respecting and inviting a response. The great German-Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber put forward the I-Thou relationship as the highest and most noble. Where we are so profoundly respectful of the other human being that we think of them as “thou”. Thou, a pronoun usually reserved for divinity or nobility. We offer another person utter respect. We don’t have an agenda to impose upon them. We simply want to get to know them on their own terms.
Listening is about true presence to each other. I’ve told you before how I experienced this in a place called the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa. Montebello Mission sits at the top of a mountain. Looking down from it you can see several small villages dotted around the valleys. The local priest and I were about to set out on foot to do a day of pastoral visits. He pointed out two villages we would visit. I asked “just two? why not more? Other villages seem close enough”. “You’ll see why two will be enough” he said. Visiting the actual villages was the least of it. Every person we met along the way was a lengthy pastoral visit in itself. With each person, with each family we exchanged greetings and spent considerable time. Sawubona is the Zulu greeting. It means “I see you”. And that is what we did. We lingered a while and we truly saw each other. No walking by and saying “Hi”. Wonderful respectful presence to each other. As someone once put it: “Love is about getting to know someone’s name!!” Our Scriptures have that concept, don’t they? God knowing each of us by name!! It sounds easy to know someone by name. But remember in this context “name” represents the whole of a wonderful person whom God loves! And so must we!
Compassion
The next part of the Love formula is the ability to “care very deeply about another person’s feelings”. It’s called compassion. It’s what Jesus was doing when he said lovingly: go and sin no more. Or: your faith has healed you. If you’ve truly listened, deeply, honestly, humbly, in your desert, in your quiet place, then you understand better your place in this universe. You’ve achieved a level of humility. The world does not revolve around you. Above all you’ve become grateful for what you’ve got. Our Buddhist friends have taught us over and over again that gratitude leads to compassion. So you begin to CARE. You care very deeply. You don’t want another person to be hurting. The times we see Jesus angry in the Bible are the times that he sees someone being oppressed. He turns his eyes with deep compassion towards the person being oppressed and with anger towards the oppressor! People are sometimes very surprised when I tell them that my definition of good communication in a personal relationship is the very same as my definition of true love in a personal relationship. Think about it. If you say you love someone, then surely you care how they are feeling. If they say something bothers them, then if you love them, you care about that and you need to find out if there is anything at all you can do about it. An argument or a debate about who is right and who is wrong is the direct opposite of good communication or good love. It’s only going to put obstacles in the way of understanding, caring and loving. But listening and then caring deeply about someone else’s pain…that is both good communication and true love! God’s kind of love: a refuge to the poor and needy, a shelter from the storm, a shade from the heat! (Isaiah 25:1-9).
Imagine the healing of relationships, communities, the whole world if we each took a thousand such opportunities for little or big acts of love! And on the other hand imagine what a dry desert results if every such opportunity is lost to futile argument or violent confrontation!
Action for Justice
Then we get to the third part of the love formula. Action for Justice. It’s what Jesus was doing when he set his face toward Jerusalem and went to his death for the cause of justice. The reason it’s so important first to listen, then to care deeply is that this is the way to being fair, to being just. I always say that justice begins at home. It begins not with world affairs but with the ability of people in their relationships, in their families, to care about each other in such a way as to be fair and just. But obviously we won’t be able to get good at justice if we aren’t first able to listen to people’s feelings and hurts, and care deeply.
So, that’s the formula. “Deep prayerful listening” plus “Compassion about the Feelings and Hurts of others” produces “Action for Justice”. It all adds up to LOVE!!!
Political Season
As we reach the height of our political season, what you’ll experience most of the time is exactly the opposite of what I have just described. You will hear some talk about “reaching out to each other” but mainly what you’ll see and hear is the language of “campaigning”. A dangerous word really. It’s actually borrowed from the language of war! You’ll see and hear:
- Loud talk which makes it hard to listen.
- Argument ad nauseam.
- Emphasis on whose right, whose stronger.
- Fear mongering.
- Bitter accusation and recrimination.
- Sadly even violence.
- Increasingly also personal insult.
Look. We can still advocate and persuade. There’s a place for that. It’s also part of caring. But it all depends on how we do it.
We are called to a different way. It’s the way of love!! And actually it’s the most powerful way of all. So powerful that you could have ten of these kinds of interactions with people between now and election day and your influence for good could be enormous. Don’t underestimate it. But how sad it would be if you allowed your interactions to be contaminated by the prevailing spirit right now of anger and division. That could add up to zero!
A human relations professor once gave his class a popquiz. The final question on the test was: “What is the name of the security guard who gives each one of us a smiling-friendly-greeting every day as we enter this building?” No-one knew. Every student left it blank. Some asked the professor as they left that evening if that question counted towards their grade and if it was a serious question. “Serious?” he said. “It may just be the most serious question in my course!” Is Jesus saying the same to us today??!! Do you really know your neighbor’s name?