The Way of Love

My last post was entitled, "Love the sinner hate the sin?".  I was attempting to unpack this phrase in such a way as to also undue it.  To my mind, it causes unnecessary and harmful division both internally (we teach ourselves to hate the part of us that sins -- this is unavoidable) and externally (how can we not judge our neighbor who sins even though we claim to love him -- especially since we reserve the right to judge our own selves because of the sin we do)?

Judging from some responses I received, there was some concern among my friends and dear readers that I was admonishing us to (instead of hating our sin) love also even our sin.  Or, at the very least, to accept all the parts of us, even those parts that cause us to sin.  Or, again, urging us to not hate anything at all -- even our sin.  These concerns are in some sense valid, but in another sense they miss the mark entirely.  I'd like to use this blog entry to see if I can pave a way forward.

I think the easiest way forward is to talk about the nature of love.  You see, the temptation is to say, "since his last blog said we shouldn't hate the parts of us that sin, we necessarily should love them."  This works, in a very limited sense, but the conclusion isn't at all what I was attempting to arrive at. Whatever else love is, I don't think it can possibly described as internal contentment with what is wrong.  I'm not saying that we should glance inside of ourselves, see all that is wrong with us, all that is unhealed in us, all that is still in formation about us, and declare that our growth is done -- or that the areas in which we sin are somehow not in need of change.

Rather, I am saying that the path into the heart of God that we all walk contains at least two very fundamental lessons which we continually learn: patience and renunciation.  To learn patience with ourselves and with our neighbors is to learn to move through hatred of our sin and their sin to grief at the wounds caused by the sin.  To learn renunciation both in our lives and in the lives of our neighbors is to learn to precisely not cling to our view of the world.  All of sense a difference between how the world is and how we think the world should be.  Renunciation is the giving of this distance (and consequently our right to do something about it) to God.

When we learn to live inside of these two virtues, we also are living a life of love -- a life of love to God and to our neighbor, and to ourselves.  The total release of the right that we quite normatively have in life -- the right to hate something or someone or something because we see it causing damage or because it widens for us this distance -- is also an experience of the freedom to love with more abandon than we can imagine.

Since love is primarily experienced either through the giving of the self or through receiving in ourselves the gift of another self, freedom is to love as water is to a fish.  The freer we are -- the more we learn to be charactized and formed by patience and renunciation -- the more we can love.  We find ourselves opened up to love.

Let me say the same thing in reverse.  What is hate?  At its core, what is it inside of us that we are labeling when we use this word?  Well, at the start anyway it is a certain aversion, but it is more than that.  It is also a clinging onto our conception of right in such a way as to justify ourselves when we condemn that which doesn't measure up.  We justify the use of anger, revulsion, distancing, (and in some cases malice and extreme forms of ill will) against whatever it is that we consider worthy of our hatred.  The measure is precisely the distance we see between how the world (or my neighbor, or my inmost self) is, and how it should be.

There are two questions we absolutely must ask ourselves: "are their any other emotions I can apply to the perception of this distance?" and, "how can I love this world, this neighbor, this particular self which I am even with all this distance I see?"  Another way to phrase the second question is, "how can I be reconciled with my world, my neighbor, and my inmost self?"

Almost as soon as one asks the questions, does it not become immediately evident that when we grieve the distance instead of hate the distance we are loving the world, the neighbor, and the self that is harmed by the distance?  Does it not also become evident (upon further reflection) that when I give up my right to this very distance itself, and instead learn to accept the world, the neighbor, and the self that I am called to love my calling becomes instantly my action?