Christmas 1996 (#3)

What love means

It is said with annoying frequency, at least it’s annoying to me, that Christmas is for children. Well I think that notion owes more to the world of Mattel Toys than it does to the Gospel and I would like to propose that Christmas is impossible, in its depth, to be appreciated by children because Christmas is basically about love, and love is the most mature, the most difficult human enterprise... after which children can only struggle in a very incoherent and a very unfinished way.

So this is a good time to reflect on what love means. And it’s been proposed that one of the parts of the genus of Christianity is that love becomes refined--I mean, there are multiple definitions of love, we all know that, but there is, I think, arguably, a peculiarly Jewish-Christian notion of love. And it might be summed up in that famous passage in Matthew which is echoed in the Letters of Paul, and the other gospels, about the injunction to love one’s enemies... Love one’s enemies... Pray for those who persecute you... I bring that particular text up because if anybody wants to think that the meaning of love is self evident, or that the Christian meaning of love is easily apprehended, all you have to do is to wrestle with that notion for a little bit... so let us say that that’s what love is all about. We’ve all had the experience, either of our own efforts, or being the victim of other people, of being loved as one’s enemy: "Yes, I love you. If it kills me, I love you..." That’s not love of course, that’s not an overflowing of one’s own freedom; that’s some kind of sick compulsion. But the very difficulty of doing that raises the stakes, so to speak. What goes into being able to love one’s enemy as an act of freedom? Well, I would like to propose one way of trying to come at that, and I’ll do it by suggesting that all of us hear within us at some very deep, perhaps inaccessible point, the nagging suspicion that we are unlovable..., that we do not deserve to be loved. And I’d like to suggest that the evidence for that is manifold...I mean, try to explain the phenomenon of being right all the time: "I called you at 10:15--No you didn’t, it was 10:20--No, it was 10:15..." Why do we create so much havoc in our lives over such trivia? And the example is multiplied an infinite number of times and places. And the question is: Why do we do that? Why is self-righteousness such a besetting fault with us human beings/ In the New Testament it becomes the fault... If you read the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus, as Matthew depicts him, excoriates in farcical terms the people who are self-righteous. What goes into being self-righteous? What are we doing in being right all the time?

I propose that we’re acting out of this suspicion that that we’re not loveable and, therefore, we must bend every conceivable effort to convince somebody, God, the cosmos, the cosmic spirits, my boss, my wife, my lover, my husband..., that I really ought to be loved, I deserve to be loved, I’ve earned the right to be loved... I cannot find any reason more persuasive than the suspicion our unloveability as the motive for our proving ourselves as loveable, over and over, in multiple ways. And it is, in fact, in multiple ways: "I will be as good as I can. I will be gooder than everybody, or, failing that, I will be badder than everybody--at least somebody will notice me." And that at least may be a working substitute for love: to be noticed.

What Christmas says to us is that that is not necessary, that that fear that one has, however well grounded it may be, and God knows that for all of us past the age of thirty it can be very well grounded, need not be the determinant power in our lives and our way of understanding ourselves. If it is true, as in the beginning of john’s Gospel that I just read, that Jesus is the light, that Jesus illuminates the depth and the meaning of all things human, then it is self evident that we did nothing to merit the appearance of this man, or his life, or his death... And what the Christian tradition has made of that is that the very appearance of Jesus is simply god’s affirmation of the divine fact that we don’t have to prove ourselves to be loveable..., that we are loved despite ourselves.

Let me push this a little further. I really believe that if you want a great insight into the psychic workings of contemporary North American humanity there are very few better places to which you can repair than the field of advertising. These people spend inordinate amounts of money on psychological study: what will grab people, what will move people,, what will touch people even at a pre-conscious level in order to get them to buy "Elmo the tickling... whatever..." The thing that finally dawned on me is why the Toyota ad that has been used for several years now has such rich meaning: "I love what you do for me, Toyota." The proposal I’m making is not that "I love you, Toyota," but "I love what you do for me, Toyota" and although that distinction may seem rather frail, I think that if you push it hard enough you will see very much that that too arises out of the sense that "I am unlovable; I need what you do for me." Of course it works on both sides, and the great sadness of course is that I never get to love you, whether it’s Toyota, or my wife, or my kids, or my boss..., I love what you do for me. And I think that none of us is totally collapsible into what we do..., for anybody. Beyond everything that I do, there is me.

Again, I want to suggest that it is this primitive sense of unloveability that lies underneath all this, and there are other implications to be drawn. I need to prove my love, therefore everybody else is in competition with me for this love of whomever. And so instead of drawing me to other people in any genuine way, it simply sets me up in this subtle dance of competition for affection, for attention, for recognition... And instead of building us together, we are fractured under the impulse of that insecurity. Of course that’s ultimately what Christmas is about: God saying, "Yeah, you are all loveable..." And therefore, being loveable, you are free then to love each other--not for what you do for anybody else, or not for what anyone does for you, but to be able to see beyond that. Somehow God has made us loveable, quite beyond ourselves, certainly beyond our own efforts... No child is going to apprehend this, or even begin to apprehend this; therefore Christmas is not for children. I’m sixty-one years old and it is only with this Christmas that some of this has dawned on me with the power that it has right now--at least from the eyebrows up.

So this is the basis for all that exuberant language of the Carols: "Joy to the World." This is why Christmas is important: because it opens for us the possibility of coming to believe that even despite ourselves there is something larger than our own suspicion of ourselves. There is that breath-taking line from the First Letter of John: "If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our hearts--God is greater than our hearts..." That is certainly one of the most moving, powerful, and richest lines in the Scriptures. Because god’s gift is greater than our hearts, we can believe that love is possible for someone who knows me, not just my bank account, or my equities, or my property, or all the bravado that I surround myself with to try to persuade everybody else that I really am loveable.

The last word... A theologian friend of mine has summarized the gospel in this phrase: "The Gospel, if we take it seriously, enables us to say in all earnestness and richness that we are all Bozos on this bus... And we can let ourselves be, and let everybody else be Bozos on this bus that we are all riding." And that is the only reason for real joy to the world.

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