So, the past
couple of days I’ve been battling a nice little
fever-flu-upper-sinus-congestion sort of thing (I’d like to thank my school
kiddos for sharing). So, I hope that this makes sense today.
Today is one of
those “duh” moments. Jesus tells us to love God and to love our neighbor. “Duh,
Jesus.” This lead me to think (in between my medicated stupors): “why does
Jesus give us this command?” I mean isn’t this self-evident? Why does He have
to make this explicit?
As a I moaned
about my fever, I quickly realized the answer.
My tendency is to
be self-centered.
I’m not talking
about being selfish. I’m talking about how at the center of all my experience
is… me. I feel this or I feel that, I’m the one who is
going through whatever it is I’m going through. And what’s more, in my mind I
have an internal, sometimes hypnotizing monologue which is always analyzing and
evaluating and interpreting things through the lens of… me.
So, for example:
when I’m driving down the road, I can easily think that people are in my
way. Or when I’m waiting in the incredibly slow line in the grocery store and
someone is taking their time, I can judge them as inconsiderate because don’t
they know that I’m in a hurry? You see how this goes.
What troubles me
about my self-centeredness is that it is kind of my “default setting,”
something that I tend to without even thinking about it. It takes no effort. It
is easy and unconscious. *(This idea is not mine, but the idea of David Foster Wallace, published
in a fantastic speech—and
later, book—entitled “This
Is Water.”)
The problem with my
unconscious self-centeredness is that I can easily and unwittingly make my
world small. I am limited by whatever is currently on my iPhone or my
to-do list. I look down and engage myself in the “me” project and the
self-centered world that I have constructed, a world that seeks my
own pursuits, my own interests, my own comforts, my own
life.
And for the most
part, the greater world is fine with that because the world hums merrily along
on the unconsciousness of people—selling me a whole list of goods focused on me
to make me more “me” than I can possibly imagine me being.
(Hmm, that
sounded like the fever talking…)
But it is true:
Worship of myself is the easiest thing to do because I am at the center of my
world. It is a default setting. It is unconscious.
And it is the
most insidious kind of slavery -- because I can never worship me enough or fill me enough and so everybody else becomes an obstacle, a frustratingly maddening obstacle, to me.
Love, on the
other hand, involves a kind of consciousness and attentiveness to the fact that
there is a whole wild world outside of myself, a huge horizon extending beyond my
interior monologue and my daily wants and needs.
The hardest part
of life is choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of our default-setting,
to become aware of a world outside of ourselves and to begin interpreting our
experiences through the lens of others and, ultimately, through the lens of
God.
Being conscious
of this outside world is a prerequisite for love.
This brings us to
Jesus and the Greatest Commandments in today’s Gospel. Self-centered me hears
today’s Gospel and thinks, “Great, more moral exhortations. Something more I
must do.” But when I hear the Gospel through the lens of God’s perspective,
what I realize is that this Commandment is firstly a proclamation of
liberation, a power that reveals to us an exciting world beyond ourselves: “love
God and your neighbor! it’s an exciting world out there!”
It is important
to note that when Jesus quotes this as the Greatest Commandment, he leaves out
the previous line—a line which he presumes that we know. What did he leave out?
“I am the Lord your God who freed you from slavery.” God wants to free us from
the slavery of our small self-centered world and liberate us into a wild,
cosmic, beautiful and exciting world where others love you and where God loves you more than you love yourself!
There is
something also very peculiar about these Commands: they reveal something to us
about God. Paradoxically, while God is at the center of all existence, God is
not self-centered. He is creative. He extends Himself. He loves. So much so
that He literally enters into our shoes.
So when Jesus
calls us to love, to open our horizons and to extend ourselves in creativity to
God and to neighbor, what Jesus is doing is inviting us into the very dynamic
of God. In other words, we are being invited into the very nature of God and to
become like Him (for God is love) and to become aware, for God is aware—so
aware that he knows all the hairs on your head.
This is the
radical proposition of the greatest commandment: God is not just commanding us
to love—God is showing us how to become like Him.
What is wonderful
about this is that, as we love God and neighbor, and as the horizon of our
world is expanded, we receive the most basic truth of our very own existence:
namely, that God loved you into being; that He is at the very center of you,
closer to you than you are to yourself.
This leads us not
to a Worship of Self, but to right worship: To Worship of God. And, more, it
leads to a worship that then attends to others because, having encountered the
God within me, I can begin to see that God dwells in others and that He loves
them. God is in that car that just cut me off on the highway. God is loving
that person who is taking forever in the grocery line.
Every moment,
therefore, can become an occasion to love—and not just to love one’s neighbor.
But to love the God who is there. Every moment can become an occasion to
worship.
How are we to
live this out on a day-to-day basis? How can we keep from falling back asleep
into an unconscious self-centeredness that devolves into a self-Worship that is
easily frustrated and inconvenienced by others?
When Jesus gives
us the Greatest Commandment, he quotes the Shema. The Shema was the daily
life-breath of Israel: they would repeat these words of love several times a
day, always bringing them to mind so that they would never lose them from their
heart.
They would repeat
them as frequently as some of us check our iPhones. And therein is the
difference. So often during our day we unconsciously practice a kind of self-worship
that closes us in and makes us forget.
Jesus is giving
us a plan to stay awake: several times a day, call this to mind. St. Francis de
Sales would stop several times a day and say, “Let us recall that we are in the
presence of God.”
We are in the
presence of God.
Admittedly, to be
so conscious of a wild, radical horizon beyond yourself—to be so awake is very
tough to do. The self-centered will think this is a task that they have to do
by themselves. Echo the worlds of the Psalmist: “I love you, Lord, my strength.”
The Lord is your
strength. When you cannot love Him with all of your strength, call upon Him.
Ask the Holy
Spirit to come into your heart, and into your mind and you soul, and to fill
you with His strength. For this is something that you cannot do on your own.
You will have
then begun to break free of that self-centered slavery. This is the Truth that
will set you free.
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