understanding of love is needed, because it is so gravely misunderstood
in our time. All too commonly, love is regarded as a sentiment, a
feeling, a "liking" for someone. While sentiment and emotion are
certainly a part of love, it is tragic to make them synonymous with
love. Certainly we mean more than that when we say, "God is love," or
when we wrestle with the concept of man showing his love of God through
his love for his neighbor. In these concepts we are thinking of love as
the moving, creating, healing power of life; of love that is "the moving
power of everything toward everything else that is."[12] Love reunites
life with life, person with person, and as such is not easily
discouraged. The most dramatic symbol of love's courage and triumph is,
as we have seen, the cross and the resurrection; it stands for the love
wherewith God has loved us. "In this is love, not that we loved God but
that he loved us...."[13] Having given us His love, we have it for our
response to Him, so that we love Him by loving one another with His love
which we received through His people. Thus, the nurturing of our
response to God's love is the work of the church. Our responsibility is
to love Him. We are to love God by loving one another, and in loving one
another we introduce one another to God. This is the work of the church
and the vocation of the people of God. We are called to love one another
reunitingly with the love wherewith God loved us.
In order for us to participate in the love of God which is at work in
the world, we need to understand ourselves and our own creaturely
problems in relation to love. Too much Christian thought about love and
its work is abstract rather than a reckoning with the complications of
human existence. In order to avoid this danger, let us turn to a
consideration of what is involved in recovering our freedom to love.
_Recovering Our Freedom to Love_
Because we are created in the image of God, our deepest need is to be
loved. This need is fundamental and has both human and divine roots. The
baby comes into being as a result of being loved. We take him in our
arms, care for him, call him by name, and reveal to him the love that we
have for him. Thus he experiences love. These experiences of love
stimulate, in turn, his love, which is the completion of his need of
love. His response to being loved is to love, and this response is not
long in coming. We see it in his smiles, in his cooing, when he pats his
mother's cheek, when he puts his little arms around her neck, and later
when he begins to toddle and bring his gifts to her. In many ways the
individual begins to show that he has been loved by revealing his
growing power to love.
Our day, however, seems to be one in which people are more conscious of
their need to be loved than of their need to love, with the result that
everyone is running around looking for love. But we do not find love by
looking for it; we find it by giving it. And when we find love by
loving, we find God. Our Lord gave us His love generously, not in order
that we might be loved, but that we might be freed to love one another.
"You received without pay, give without pay."[14] He calls us from our
childish preoccupations with security to the appropriate adult
occupations of the mature Christian. He calls us away from our suckling
tendencies to our responsibility to feed others, from receiving to
giving. If someone came to me and asked, "How can I find God?" I would
answer, "Go find someone to love and you'll find Him."
Unless the searcher was love-deprived and in need of reassurance, I
would not begin by figuratively putting my arm around him and cherishing
him. There are situations where this is necessary. People can be so
broken and so hurt that they cannot love, and they need to be cherished
and reassured until they can. One of the responsibilities of the church
is to be on the alert for those people who in later life need the love
and reassurance they should have had when they were younger.
Unfortunately, however, many of us are embarrassed when we are
confronted by emotionally needy persons. We may resent their need and
the demand which it makes on us, with the result that they may never
know the love of man and God, and may never be brought to the point
where they may participate in the life and work of Christ which is, as
we have seen, to love.
Of course, it is not easy to love, especially when we feel unequal to
it, are tempted to regress, and want to be loved and cuddled ourselves.
Yet even then the answer to our need is to love. Many of us have had
experiences that have borne out this truth. Once when my son and I had
had a quarrel in which I had lost my temper, and was feeling discouraged
as a father and not at all competent where human relations were
concerned, the phone rang and a young couple asked if they might come
and talk with me about the difficulty they were having with their young
son. Because of my feelings of wretched inadequacy, my inclination was
to say "No," but they were so obviously in need of help and so
importunate that I arranged for them to come to see me immediately. I
had no confidence in being able to help them, but I did try to listen to
them. As I listened, I participated in their thinking about their own
situation. When the session was over, they thanked me enthusiastically
for my help. After they were gone, I realised that however much I had
helped them, I myself had been helped. By accepting my responsibilities
as a counselor and by listening to them, I was loving them; and because
I loved them, I had the experience of being loved. The relationship in
which our love is needed may offer little apparent encouragement, but
once we give ourselves, the resources for the work of love become
available.
It is, therefore, as important for us to love as it is for us to be
loved, and our need to love is as great as the need to be loved. If we
are not able to love, life is as deficient as it would have been if we
had not been loved. We must not assume that because we have been loved
we shall automatically become a person who loves. Human beings do not
develop that automatically. Certainly the experience of being loved
prepares us to love, but we can misuse the gifts of love. We may decide
to appropriate them for ourselves. We may not want to assume
responsibility for others. But having received love and choosing not to
love, we may lose such love as we have. We then become self-centered and
selfish misers of love, and therefore loveless.
How can we love our children so that they will become givers of love
rather than hoarders of it? How can the freedom and power to love be
released in them? The answer is, by encouraging their love responses. We
have already recognized the importance, first, of the need to be loved,
and second, of the need to love. We now face the importance of our being
able to accept love and of encouraging the attempts of people, and
especially of our children, to express their love. We might assume that
it is easy to welcome their responses. Unfortunately, our expressions of
love do not always please those to whom we make them. Because our love
offerings are not appreciated and accepted, we may feel unloved and
rejected. After repeated attempts to express our love successfully, and
having been repeatedly rejected and discouraged, we may give up and turn
our love in on ourselves.
A rose gardener told me of an instance that illustrates how difficult it
is to accept some love offerings. He not only grew roses, but exhibited
them as well. On one occasion, he had several blooms that he was
nurturing for a coming show, one of which was being produced on a bush
of his favorite variety. On the day before the exhibit his four-year-old
son appeared before him with ecstatic face and with his prize rose
clutched stemless in his hand, saying, "Look Daddy, what I brought you."
It was obvious that the youngster, who adored his father, thought that
he was presenting the perfect gift of his love, because he knew how much
his father liked that particular rose. The father, on the other hand,
confessed that he responded as the rose grower and exhibitor, rather
than as one who had an opportunity to encourage his son's love responses
by recognizing, from his son's point of view, the appropriateness of
the gift. When, therefore, he very understandably scolded and spanked
his child for picking the rose, the little boy was dreadfully upset.
Episodes of this kind, if only occasional, are not serious, because they
are experienced in the context of a relationship that is predominantly
loving, supportive, and encouraging.
When the expressions of love and affection of children are not received
with understanding and acceptance, their attempts to learn to love find
no encouragement. Because they are being prevented from learning to love
their parents and others, they are being prevented also from learning to
love God in and through them. Our Lord's response to the gifts brought
to Him demonstrates the kind of responses we should make to one another.
Even when people's gifts were poorly motivated and ill-chosen, He was
able to look behind them and see and understand the person who gave.
Although Zacchaeus seemed to be motivated only by curiosity, our Lord
invited him to come down out of the tree and asked that He might have
dinner with him, thus moving behind the greed that had made Zacchaeus a
publican.[15] And because our Lord was able to accept the gift of Mary
Magdalene, her true love was called forth.[16] So it is with us. Our
offerings often are pitiful and ill-chosen, but He looks upon the heart
and sees there that really we are trying to express our love despite our
ill-chosen means of doing so.
If we are to participate in the life of Christ and be the instruments of
His love, we must learn to be hospitable to one another's efforts to
express love. Parents need to look upon the hearts of their children and
see deeply what they are trying to express. Husbands and wives likewise
need to look behind the externals of behavior. What we do on the outside
often fails to represent truly and adequately what is on the inside. We
all need encouragement to love, and hospitality toward human attempts to
express love is one of the surest ways in which we can participate in
the contemporary living of Christ in the world.
_Some Disciplines of Love_
Now there are some disciplines that we need to follow as we engage in
the dialogue of love. First, there is the discipline of giving oneself.
It is the discipline of keeping oneself responsible for and to one
another, responsible in facing issues and in making decisions. The only
way to love is to communicate love by word and action. We may learn to
use our power of being to speak and act the word of love. We should
refuse to withhold it for any reason, including our fear of speaking it.
Of course, there is risk in giving ourselves. Our gift of love may not
be accepted, may not be appreciated, and may even be exploited. In
giving love we may be hurt because of the nature of others' responses.
But we will be stronger for having given it, and others may be called
forth by it. Life cannot remain the same when love has been expressed.
Second, there is the discipline of holding ourselves to our own part.
This is the discipline of allowing others to speak for themselves; or
again, the discipline of refraining from trying to carry on both sides
of a dialogue. We are always doing this; that is, we speak to the image
we have of the other person. We try to anticipate his response and take
away his freedom to respond and speak for himself. We choose our part of
the dialogue in response to what we think his reaction will be and
thereby rob ourselves of our freedom to be. There can be no
communication between the images which two people hold of each other.
Communication is possible only between two persons who, out of mutual
respect, really address one another.
A third discipline is to accept the demand in love and our obligation to
meet that demand. The compulsive element in love is hard for us to
accept. But we cannot separate law from love. Law is implicit in love.
Our Lord, Who is the incarnation of divine love, warned that He would
not remove one bit of the law. He did not destroy the law, but by His
love fulfilled it. It is really good that law is a part of love. Our own
love relationships benefit from the presence of law in love, because law
guides and protects our relationship. When we are "in love," or in
union with one another, we are not conscious of the law, but it is
implicitly present. We can be said to be "living above the law."
The law that is implicit in the relationship between a man and a woman
who love each other is that they shall respect and act trustworthily in
relation to one another; that they shall care for one another in all the
ways that are necessary to their relationship. As long as love prevails,
they are not conscious of this law. They do not need it. But if for any
reason they should "fall out of" love, then they become conscious of
their obligations to each other. Their relationship is now lived under
the burden of law, and they will find it harder to observe than they did
before. They now are being held together by their obligations, and it
may be that while being thus held together they will again find each
other in love. When they look back on this period some years later, they
may call the whole experience love, because then they will see that the
obligations of their relationship are a part of their love. Obviously,
this is mature and not infantile love. Love that accepts responsibility
and its obligations is love that is not primarily concerned about its
privileges, although it gives thanks for whatever privileges it has. It
recognizes itself not primarily as an emotion, but as a way of life; and
it is more concerned about commitment than sensation.
By the employment of these principles that we have just rehearsed, we
can help our children grow in their capacity to love and thereby become
more capable of a heroic commitment to one another. This kind of
commitment should characterize the members of the Christian fellowship,
the men and women in whose lives the Spirit of the Christ is incarnate.
We have seen that we need to be loved in order that we may love others
and that we should encourage one another's love responses. Does this
mean that our attempts to express love should be accepted without
correction? What should the rose-growing father of the little boy have
done? One view is that the father should have accepted the gift with
thanks, recognizing only the child's intention. Certainly, his
intentions should be honored and his gift accepted. But the boy also
needed help in learning how to express his love to others. Here is
something we are always having to learn. All of us have had the
experience of doing or giving something that was intended to be an
expression of our love, only to discover that the gift was not
appreciated by the one to whom it was given, and we find ourselves
saying, "Oh, I didn't mean it to be that way." With children and with
one another we need to strike a balance between acceptance of the
intention and guidance in choosing the means for the expression of love.
Loving is an art, and we all need to learn the art and to refine its
practice. One would expect Christians and church people, who are
supposed to be incarnations of the spirit of love, to be masters of the
art. Yet, to the world, we often appear to be ungracious people. So let
us learn to love one another, and let us train our children in the
practice of the art of love, by encouraging and disciplining them in it.
If a text for this responsibility were needed, we might take it from the
ancient liturgical language of the church in which we say, "We receive
this person into the congregation of Christ's flock," which should mean
that we receive the person into the congregation of persons in whom the
love of Christ is incarnate.
_The Language of Words and Life_
Unfortunately, however, we often use the words that suggest the right
meaning but fail to carry out that meaning in our lives. All too easily
our religious statements become empty forms, separated from the vitality
and meaning which they are supposed to express. Remember, for instance,
how vainly we sometimes say the Lord's Prayer, which is a form that our
Lord gave us, by means of which we could express the vitality of our
relationship with God and one another. Likewise, we can honor and use
the correct verbal and other symbols about the church and Christian
fellowship, its rites and ceremonies, and yet fail to translate them
into action, with the result that our rites and ceremonies and
doctrinal statements become dry, empty forms. Instead of being the means
of new life, they may only disappoint people, because they do not really
communicate the meaning that they seem to promise. Every church should
always test whether its forms are really expressive of the truth which
it professes. It is not enough that we speak the truth; we must live it.
It has been given to men to communicate both by word and by the life
that is lived. There must always be a vital relation between the meaning
that is being communicated in the word and the form or means of its
communication. The breakdown of education and of religion occurs when
there is a breakdown between the human experience with its meaning and
the word which represents it. This breakdown is complete when speaking
the word becomes a substitute for living its meaning. This breakdown
also occurs when a culture undertakes to educate by means of words and
concepts only, and neglects to employ what happens between man and man
as an integral and indispensable part of the curriculum.
The word and the meaning of the experience belong to each other and need
each other, and the relation between them is a necessary part of
education. Let us use the word "fight" as an illustration. We have this
word because of man's experience in fighting. Out of the relationships
of conflict and combat comes the experience we think of as fighting, and
the word "fight" stands for it. The very young child learns to fight
before he learns the word "fight." So far as he knows, the experience of
fighting exists only between himself and his mother, and it is necessary
for him to discover that fighting is a universal human activity. He
learns the meaning of the word "fight" by the meanings that he brings
out of his own combat, and on the basis of these he begins to understand
the universal meaning of "fight." The word thus unites his little,
individual experience with the experience of the human race of which he
is a part. Therefore the word becomes an effective instrument in
teaching him the meaning of his experience in the context of the
experience of his own kind.
Similarly, because of his relationship to his mother, the child may
experience her trustworthiness long before he knows the word "trust,"
but he needs a word for this experience. Then, as he begins to acquire
the ability to convey these meanings with words, he learns the word
"trust" and immediately the door opens so that his experience becomes
related to the much larger experience of the people that have lived
before him. If a child is being brought up in the Christian fellowship,
the minute he begins to have a word to describe the trustworthiness of
his relationship with his mother, he also begins to understand the
meaning of trust as Christians have experienced it in relation to God.
On the other hand, it is difficult to convey the meaning of Christ's
death to a child. Here the words are crucial to the understanding of the
meaning, but he cannot bring out of his own life sufficient experiences
to make the meaning of the concept available to him. But it is important
to introduce him to these concepts by means of words against the time
when the words will carry meaning. As we live with our children we help
them interpret the meaning of their experiences. Some day they will be
able to move from the little meanings that they have accumulated about
life and death to the great meanings of the life and death and
resurrection of Christ by means of the little word "cross" and other
associated words. Education requires the use of both the language of
words _and_ the language of relationships. We teach children the words
of our faith, but at the same time we try to live with them in ways that
will provide the meanings that will prepare them for understanding the
meanings of the faith. And this is what I mean when I suggest that what
happens between us is an indispensable part of the curriculum.
_The Curriculum of Relationship_
This emphasis upon the relationship between parent and child, between
teacher and pupil, between person and person, as a part of the learning
situation, seems to put a heavy burden upon the teacher. After all, it
was difficult enough when the teacher had to be responsible for the
correct words for the transmission of the truth, and for the
understandings that must go with them. Now, in addition, we have to pay
attention to what is going on between teacher and pupil. The work of
teaching is much bigger than mere verbal transmission, and nothing less
is worthy of being called Christian teaching.
This kind of teaching requires that the truth being taught be incarnate
in the relationship between men, which was what God did in Christ. The
teaching of Christ is contained not only in His words, but also in His
life. His life gave meaning to His words and made them uniquely
different from any other words that had ever been spoken. Actually, many
of the things that our Lord taught were not new, but His life was, and
this made His teaching unique. The same principle must apply to us. Some
instruction given in the name of Christian education is dull,
monotonous, and irrelevant. There is nothing untrue about it, but it is
taught without the conviction born of experience, and it is not
expressed in what goes on between man and man. On the other hand, a
recognition of the responsibilities of this kind of teaching should be
coupled with the joys and satisfactions of it. It is the kind of
teaching that can relieve us of some of the anxieties of accomplishment.
_A Word of Encouragement_
Many parents and teachers are concerned about the quality of the care
and teaching which they give children, and they are particularly worried
about their failures and sins in relation to them. Present in many of us
is the fear that we may have permanently impaired the future welfare of
those for whom we are responsible. This leads us to try to be perfect in
the discharge of our duties and thus prevent serious injury to our
children. In other words, we would like to love them perfectly, which,
if we were able to do, would ill prepare them for their life in this
world.
Furthermore, and more importantly, implicit in this anxiety is a grave
misconception of what it means to be a Christian. The test of our love
and faith is not the absence of failure and sin and problems, but lies
in what we are able to do about them. Of course, Christian parents get
angry with their children and say and do things that hurt them. We are
haunted by the signs in our children that we have failed them, by the
evidences of their anxiety, by the problems they sometimes have in
relation to other people, by their lying and stealing, by their
hostility and quarrelsomeness, and by their excessive competitiveness
and jealousy. Sometimes the scenes around the family table are far
different from our image of what Christian family life and fellowship
should be. We wonder where we have failed, grow discouraged, and fail
again. We are embarrassed by the contradiction that our children see
between the things that we say and the things that we do.
Parents and teachers who, like Mrs. Strait, live by the law, either have
to blind themselves to what's going on in their relationships or else
become profoundly discouraged. And if we are like Mr. Churchill, our
decision will be to ignore human problems and to turn ourselves to a
devotion of God, as if that were possible! Dr. Manby would wait for time
to take care of the matter, and Mr. Knowles would frantically cram more
knowledge about the Bible into the minds of parents and children in the
hope that, somehow or other, knowing about God and Christian teaching
would produce the necessary changes. Mr. Clarke, of course, would turn
the whole "mess" over to the clergy.
Implicit in the situations we have been discussing is a concept of
success, the assumption being that if we love God and our neighbor
everything we do will turn out all right. My grandfather always
maintained that his business prospered because he kept the laws of God.
When we stop to think about it, we realize what a faulty concept this
is. After all, it was not easy for Christ to accomplish the purposes of
love in this world, and there is no reason why it should be any easier
for us. It is not easy to maintain the dialogue of life; it is not easy
to call forth the being of others; it is not easy to regain the freedom
to love even when we respond to the spirit of love. We recognize the
credibility and promise of all these principles, but wonder at the
difficulty of their application.
_The Work of Love_