BEARING THE BEAMS OF LOVE
Christmas
Sunday 2008
I:
-- I
played hockey for twelve seasons. I
never weighed more than one hundred and fifty-five pounds.
I regularly played against two hundred and ten pound gorillas who
were as mean as a junk-yard dog. I
survived the twelve seasons inasmuch as I always knew how to protect
myself on the ice. I took to
heart the advice which Ted “Scarface” Lindsay gave to Stan Mikita
when Mikita moved from junior hockey to the NHL.
Mikita, a smaller fellow, had voiced his fear that he wasn’t
tough enough to play in the NHL. “Stan”,
Lindsay said, “as long as the stick is in your hand you are as tough
as anyone on the ice. Never
drop your stick.”
Because I could always protect myself on the ice I was all the
more surprised to learn, years later, that I couldn’t protect myself
politically, institutionally. Politically
I was as defenceless as a first-time skater standing on wobbly legs at
centre ice: he’s unable even to get out of the way, never mind run
down anyone else.
Subsequently I learned that not only could I not protect myself
politically, institutionally, I couldn’t protect myself
psychologically. I seemed to
get bushwacked emotionally -- or felt I got bushwacked -- in a way that
most people seemed to avoid, or at least disguise.
I seemed unable either to avoid it or disguise it.
I concluded that I had to learn to protect myself.
Detachment was to be my first piece of armour.
“Be laid back”, I told myself over and over.
“Be detached (by now it was a mantra); stay cool; keep your gut
unhooked.” It all went
exceedingly well, and I thought I was really progressing at remaking
myself psychologically; it all went well, that is, for three hours.
Then the phone rang. A
forty-three year old woman had called me from
Mississauga
’s
Credit
Valley
Hospital
out-patient department. She
needed a ride from the hospital to work.
Take a cab? She
wanted to talk to me. She
was riddled with tumours, skinny as a broom handle, and had just had her
pain-killer dosage increased. Her
skin-colour was a ghastly yellow-green-brown and she was struggling to
keep upright a marriage that was close to capsizing.
End of detachment. End
of being laid back. Gut
hooked all over again.
Then I recalled the words of Gerald May, MD.
Gerald May is an American physician, now living in
Washington
, who has written much in the field of spiritual direction.
(A spiritual director, different from a pastoral counsellor or a
psychotherapist, is someone who helps individuals discern and assist the
movement of God’s grace within them and God’s way for them.)
Professionally Gerald May is a psychiatrist who served, at one
time, with the United States Air Force in
Viet Nam
. In one of his many books
May has written, “Some wisdom deep inside us knows it’s impossible
to love safely; we either enter it undefended or not at all”. We
can’t love safely; either we love defencelessly or we don’t love.
Instantly I admitted to myself what I had known in my heart all
along, despite my short-lived efforts at detachment and coolness: I
admitted that a disciple of Jesus Christ whose preoccupation is survival
is no disciple at all. Dr.
May is correct. We can’t
love safely.
Next I pondered the two lines from the poet, William Blake, which
May quoted in his book, The
Awakened Heart.
And we are put on earth a little space
That we might learn to bear the beams of love.
Gerald
May says only three things about this quotation.
We are to bear love in the three dictionary senses of “bear”.
(i) We are to grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and
love’s pain. (ii) We are
to carry love and spread it around -- “as children carry and spread
measles and laughter”, he adds. (iii)
We are to bring love to birth. When
I read this I was so startled that I didn’t move.
Slowly my mind spun out what it is to bear
love in this three-fold sense.
II(i):
--
We must grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and love’s
pain. Love’s beauty we
understand. But love’s pain? Does love pain?
Can it? Yes.
And in my older age I have come to see that beauty brings with it
its own pain.
When the Shepherd family was last in
England
we travelled into the
Yorkshire
moors. Everyone has some
picture of the Yorkshire moors, thanks to the writings of the
Yorkshire
veterinarian, James Herriott. He
hasn’t exaggerated. We
Shepherds walked together upon the moors as the sun was setting.
I shan’t attempt to describe it.
Suffice it to say it was so beautiful as to leave us dumbfounded.
The beauty was so exquisitely beautiful as to border on the
surreal. In the next instant
the beauty seemed so intense as to make us ache.
The beauty surrounding us contrasted so very sharply with the
unbeauty we find on so many fronts in life that this wordless beauty
brought with it a peculiar kind of pain.
In the midst of the unlove which we find on so many fronts in
life we are startled when we find ourselves loved with a love whose
intensity is beautiful, to be sure, and whose beauty makes us ache.
When we are loved not because we are useful to someone else, not
because we are needed or convenient; when we are loved for our own sake,
loved for love’s sake -- this is when we learn what it is to endure
the exquisite beauty and ache of love.
It’s easy to confuse love with other linkages.
My adult daughters love me; they are also counting on an
inheritance. My wife loves
me; she is also legally bound to me.
My mother loves me; she is also old and sick and has made me
executor of her will and granted me power of attorney.
What’s more, all of these people to whom I am related by blood
or marriage would be considered nasty, deficient themselves, if they
didn’t love me. At the
same time, none of this means that they don’t love me for my sake,
love me for love’s sake.
Still, there are circumstances where the love with which we are
loved can only be love for our
sake, love for love’s sake, because we aren’t linked in any way to
those who love us. I marvel
at the love with which I am loved when this or that person who loves me
will never profit from my estate, never be the beneficiary of my
life-insurance, never have any legal tie to me; when in fact there is no
material advantage to loving me, no social advantage -- no advantage of
any kind in loving me. Yet
they continue to pour upon me a love whose beauty is so beautiful as to
make me ache. Not only is
there no advantage accruing to them; there is every disadvantage.
For I have embarrassed them in public on occasion.
I have committed social gaffes in their presence that left them
wishing (for a few minutes, anyway) that I was at someone else’s
party. I have plunged them
into emotional anguish just because they were so closely identified with
me in my emotional anguish. And
I have perplexed them as they stood speechless before my
incomprehensible spasms of irrationality.
The longer I live the more amazed I am at all of this; which is
to say, the longer I live the more I must grow in my capacity to endure
love and not flee it, not find it so strange as to be foreign, not
resist it inasmuch as I can’t control it, not allow its singularity to
diminish its glory. The
longer I live the more I must cherish it and grow in my capacity to
endure it.
We must bear love in the sense of growing in our capacity to
endure love’s beauty and love’s pain.
(ii)
-- In
the second place we are to bear love in the sense of carrying love and
spreading it. Surely we are
to carry it and spread it chiefly unselfconsciously.
I know, there are situations where we have to clench our teeth
and resolve that contempt won’t consume our love.
There are days when we have to fight the temptation to despise or
hate as surely as our Lord fought assorted temptations in the
wilderness. But we can’t
be fighting all the time. We
can’t have our teeth clenched and our resolve clothesline-taut all the
time -- or else we’d be grim, grim as death.
We carry or spread love chiefly unselfconsciously.
Ever since Louis Pasteur published his discoveries we have known
about the transmission of communicable diseases.
Such diseases move throughout the human population by means of
germs; invisible to the naked eye, but no less real for that.
In a fallen world disease is naturally contagious.
And in a fallen world contempt is naturally contagious too.
No one has to be taught to despise others; left alone, humankind
does it naturally in this, the era of the Fall.
Then love can be spread only by an infusion of God’s Spirit.
Only the Spirit (everywhere in scripture the Spirit is the
effectual presence of God) can cause the love we pour out on others to
do something besides run off them like rain slicking off an umbrella.
Only the Spirit of God can cause love to stick to others, to
penetrate, to swell, and to declare that love has brought forth its
increase in someone (all of us) who is, in some measure, love-deprived.
The body’s immune system is a good thing.
It keeps us from falling sick with scores of different diseases
in the same day. Yet there
is one place where the body’s immune system is counter-productive:
when we need a heart-transplant. Here
our immune system has to be overridden or we shall reject the one thing
we need most.
We human beings have an immune system, as it were, of a different
sort as well. It keeps us
from being “suckered” by every last fad, notion, idea, ideology,
ploy, scheme, deviousness. And
yet there is one place where our beneficial immune system (it renders us
rightly suspicious) must be overridden by the Spirit of God if we
aren’t to reject love. Only
God himself can do this. And
this is precisely what he has promised to do.
We shall leave him to do it, even as he leaves us to what we must
do: bear love in the sense of carrying it, spreading it.
(iii):
-- We
are to bear love, finally, in the sense of bringing it forth.
Once again it’s the case that of ourselves we can’t.
Just as we, of ourselves, can’t make our love for others adhere
to them, so we can’t, of ourselves, quicken love in them, bring forth
in them that love which is soon to be love from them.
Of ourselves we can’t render someone else a loving person.
Once again only God can; and once again he has promised to do
this as he takes up and honours our unselfconscious commitment to people
who find in our commitment to them what they have found nowhere else.
Gerald May once more, the psychiatrist whose work has meant so
much to me: May was with the United States Air Force in Viet Nam where
he worked in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital, then returned
home where he worked in an American prison before moving on to a state
psychiatric hospital. Working
in these three venues occupied twenty years of his life.
He says these twenty years were bleak, indescribably bleak.
Every day he drove to work wondering what on earth he was doing,
even what on earth he thought he was doing.
For instance, every day he spoke with a woman, a patient in a
state hospital, who never said a word.
This patient not only said nothing; she appeared so vacant as not
even to notice him when he was speaking to her.
Still he didn’t ignore her (even though it’s difficult not to
ignore someone who is utterly unresponsive) but always did his medical
duty by her, changing medications and writing up charts, speaking to her
every day, mute though she remained.
This situation continued for six months.
One day, in the course of the same hospital routine, he was
fishing in his jacket pockets for a “light” when this unspeaking
woman walked out of the room into the corridor and wordlessly, silently
beckoned a nurse to her. “Dr.
May needs matches for his pipe”, the psychotic woman said.
Only God can bring love to birth; and God does precisely this as
he takes up and honours the commitments we make to others.
III:
-- It
is Christmas Sunday. Today
we praise God for incarnating in the babe of
Bethlehem
that love which God is himself, for the Incarnation is the outer
expression of the innermost heart of God.
Unquestionably the Incarnate One bore love in the threefold sense
of “bear.” Jesus most certainly received love from others; he
endured that love which is so exquisitely beautiful as to ache.
When the adoring woman poured the costliest perfume on his feet
he remarked, “She has done a beautiful thing to me.... she has
anointed my body beforehand for burying.” (Mark 14:6,8) (There we have
both love’s beauty and love’s pain.)
Just as certainly Jesus carried love, spread it, spread it with
his crucified, spread-out arms. As
the gospel writer attests: “Having loved his own who were in the
world, Jesus loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)
And just as certainly Jesus brought love to birth.
Matthew was a tax-collector who had “sold out” to
Rome
and now stood to gain financially by collaborating.
Simon was a zealot, a terrorist who had vowed the assassination
of every last collaborator he could safely stab.
What kept these two men in the same apostolic band except the
love which Jesus had brought to birth in both?
What else kept Jews and Gentiles in the same congregation when
Gentiles had always regarded Jews as anti-intellectual and inflexible,
while Jews had always regarded Gentiles as bereft of God and shamelessly
immoral? What else keeps any
congregation in one fellowship?
You
and I are to “bear the beams of love”, in the words of the poet,
William Blake. We can bear
love in the three-fold sense of enduring its beauty and its pain,
carrying it and spreading it, and committing ourselves to those in whom
God will bring it to birth; we can do this just because he whose birth
we celebrate in this season has done it already and done it in us.
Then come, let us adore him, for he is Christ the Lord.
The
Reverend Dr Victor Shepherd
Advent IV
21st December 2008
Church of St. Bride, Anglican
Mississauga
