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The Divine Perspective on Human Loving

Easter 5, Year B : 13 May 2012 : 1 John 4: 7-10 , John 15: 9-17

In bookshops these days one of the largest sections will often be devoted to self-help books. As you look closely at the plethora of titles you will soon find that many of them are how to guides on relationships, romantic, marital and family. Some of them can be quite good. A few years back relationship services was making wide use of Harville Hendrix’s Getting the Love you Want, a book that was followed up by the rather ominously titled Keeping the Love You Find.

These books assume that the choices we make in intimate relationships are based on sub conscious shaping forces from our family of origin, so that women are often influenced by the kind of men their fathers were, and men by the kind of women their mothers were. Where the theory gets scary is its insight that often we chose to be closely associated with people who bring us up against an unresolved relational issue with these significant figures from our past. We are subconsciously trying to repeat and represent the issue in our present experience so as to solve it this time.

But that wont happen unless we become fully aware of what is going on underneath the surface of things, admit to ourselves and our partner what the real relational script is, and then redevelop the relationship on the basis of who we are actually dealing with, rather than who we imagined them to be.

Some bright sparks have taken this kind of thinking and applied it to the life of congregations, in what is called systems theory. Church congregations are analysed as if they were a large family with a typical style of behaviour that persists over long periods of time. Each one of them has its own particular anxieties, bad behaviours, attractive traits, and type of person it appeals to. Leadership becomes a matter of adopting a suitable, as it were, parenting style that minimises anxieties and pathologies, and maximises helpful behaviours and healthy patterns of relationship.

I would be the first to admit that a certain degree of emotional literacy, self-knowledge and relational savvy are useful for anyone who is about to get married, whose thinking of starting an intimate relationship, or who is involved in church leadership. But in recent years I have felt a growing uneasiness with the kind of relational thinking that I have just mentioned, particularly as it affects the life of Christians.

It is rather earth bound, assuming as it does that human beings are the measure of everything, and that this life and its rewards and consolations are all that is on offer. It is somewhat reductive, focussing as it does on people’s pathologies, vulnerabilities, and sub-conscious blind spots. With that can come a certain degree of cynicism about relationships - as a former supervisor once said to me of marriage preparation work, "Just remember this Hugh, the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers." And it tends to be about managing people, relationships and communities. That after all is what Freud believed about life - human beings are in the grip of powerful sub-conscious forces that they can become aware of but cant change, there is no cure for our pathologies but we can learn to live them in appropriate ways, and when we get rid of our cocooning fantasies we see life as it really is in its rather bleak dimensions, we can then start managing our lives in helpful ways.

Suppose though we start looking at human relational connections, and people’s attempts to love each other, from a God’s eye perspective, which is what we were hearing about this morning in the first letter of John, and in John’s gospel. These texts assume that what love is, is defined by God, who generated this relational energy in the first place. It assumes that we love because God loved us first; we are, as it were, passing on the torch to others, though at a lower wattage, and often with some other ingredients mixed in with it in not altogether helpful ways. God has no illusions about the extent to which neediness and folly contaminates human loving - he gives it the blunt description sin - but as this dynamic connectional energy streams from him towards us he is clear that it is the most powerful reality in the universe.

When human loving is looked at from this end of the telescope then quite another perspective emerges on relationships. When marriage is looked at in this way we see its long-term goal. Fr Carl often used to quote the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire who said to his bride just after their wedding, "Now we can help each other get into heaven." And a phrase from the epistle to the Romans comes to mind, "Accept one another as Christ accepted you, to the glory of God the Father." When we give up the struggle to change our intimate other into the kind of person who suits us, and instead look out on the world through their eyes as they see it, then we escape the cage of the self, and see the world with a freshness of vision. When we accept the person we are with on an as is where is basis, which is the way Christ accepts us, then many of the tension points in the relationship slip away, and we are set free to enjoy them for who and what they are in all their singularity and otherness.

And the God’s eye perspective on Christian congregations doesn’t see them as a flawed family beset by a seething mass of pathologies. Rather a more positive picture emerges.

Speaking personally I can report that looking back on over a half a lifetime in the Church I am sure one of the effects has been to improve my slender store of social skills and intimacy skills. There have been times when I have felt out of my depth in complex and demanding pastoral situations. In the midst of the anxiety and confusion I have comforted myself with the thought - this is more interesting than selling cars. And of course I have had to grow and expand as a person to be able to meet these sorts of demands.

But the most significant effect of church membership has been the meeting and mixing with a wider range of people than would have come my way had I been left to my own devices in shaping my social world. What is more, moving within this more varied mixture of people proceeds along the agenda of not just getting along with people, but also, wherever possible, of loving them just as Christ loves me.

There have been times when I have been tempted to give up on people, and to use the usual exclusion tactics, and then a warning voice sounds within my conscience - just remember that this is a sister or brother for whom Christ died.

Thomas Aquinas defined Christian love as seeking the best interests of the other. It sounds rather cold blooded as a definition of love, but then he was a rather rational person. And when it comes to loving the sister or brother for whom Christ died it is desirable that the waxing and waning of our variable emotions not rule us. Some clear thinking about what they actually need from us for their further development as a Christian is helpful. The issue then becomes - who is this person on the road to becoming, as Christ draws them towards the fullness of who he intends them to be - and what small self-forgetting role might I have in helping to make that happen?

Let’s remember that Christ is their saviour, not us. Humility is a precious Christian character trait in the business of getting alongside another Christian. It is the art of keeping the self out of it, of not requiring emotional goods from them, as we journey with them for a small part of the way on the road to the fullness of the Kingdom.

In every congregation there will be difficult people. How else could it be given the falleness of humanity, and the way in which the gospel promise of healing and forgiveness draws wounded people like a moth to a flame. How a church responds to them says a lot about its Christian maturity, and its capacity for Christ like love. We should neither allow them to take over the agenda of our life together, nor exclude them with a ruthless exit strategy. The ability to set boundaries, and to exercise patience is important here. The exercise of firm leadership is part of Christian loving in such situations. Always there will be the nagging uncertainty as to whether fellow Christians have found us to be difficult at times, and there will be the certainty that our loving heavenly Father has shown great patience towards us in times past.

Sometimes conflict crops up in congregations. It can become intense when there is something worth fighting about. When a Christian sister or brother becomes an opponent, even an enemy in such a conflict situation, a great test of Christian character is required of us. We should continue to treat them honourably, courteously, with no underhand tactics used to advance our cause, or to discredit them. The ability to fight cleanly is something the Anglican Communion needs right now, both at a national and at a worldwide level.

In any city there are clubs that bring people with a common interest together. We have got one too. If we forget it then we are lost. We are not a social club. We are not an Anglican culture group. It is our participation and our sharing in the deep things of the Christian God that unites us, and that provides the agenda of our life together. A belief in his saving love for us, the courage to risk being mocked for being a Christian, a commitment to the high ethical standards expected of Christ’s followers, a looking forward to being with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in that future, fulfilled time called the Kingdom- this is the stuff of our shared life that we must cling to - because it is what generates our Christian loving of one another.