Although it is obvious from the bulk of my writing that I approach things from a distinctly Christian perspective, I try to write about things of the spirit that are more broadly relevant across a variety of spiritual traditions. I think there is so much we can learn from each other, and I believe "that truth" is not the sole property of any one religion or tradition. One thing that definitely does not translate well across beliefs, or even across denominations within the Christian tradition, is Church politics. Few of us are interested in the inner workings of polity and authority even of our own particular tradition, much less someone else's. However, today I want to venture into this frequently mundane territory. There is a current argument in my Episcopal Diocese of Albany that I believe resonates on a much larger human scale. So, bear with me for a little bit of background and I promise to get to a point...
The Diocese of Albany is one of the more conservative/evangelical dioceses in the Episcopal church. Of the six New York dioceses, five bishops were in support of the same-sex marriage law and four will now allow Episcopal clergy to perform same-sex unions. The Diocese of Albany is the lone hold-out, whose bishop just sent a pastoral letter to be read in every parish reiterating his continuing ban not only on performing these weddings, but on clergy participating in any way in such weddings or recognizing such relationships. In it, he claims a "long-standing commitment to acknowledge homosexual persons as loved by God, and as recipients of pastoral care within the Church" and makes the entirely unsubstantiated (nobody ever asked us!) claim that the "overwhelming majority of the people and clergy in the Diocese of Albany do not and cannot support the new marriage legislation." The Bishop is quoted by Dennis Wisnom in the Albany Via Media webpages as characterizing those who disagree with him as "well intentioned people, but they are misguided." I am told by those who know him better than I that the Bishop is "a very loving person," but that it is also characteristic that he believes he has the whole truth in this matter (and in others) and that he sees himself as right and others as wrong or misguided when they disagree.
Thus, we get to the point of my concern and my larger question. I wonder if it is possible to really love and at the same time to be sure that one is "correct" and others "misguided"? I submit that it is not!
It gets down to the meaning of love. Even though we do lip service to the great commandment that includes "love the other as you love yourself," we have turned "charity" [the Latin version of the Greek work agape -- according to Encyclopaedia Britannica defined in the Christian tradition as "man’s love for man ... based not upon the desirability of its object but upon the transformation of its subject through the power of divine agāpe"] into something that we think of more as "alms giving," and we think of "compassion" as "pity" rather than in it's literal sense of "to suffer with, or to feel with." That is, we deprive these words of much of their power by focusing on the object of the love rather than the original sense of transformative love that has at its core the subject's vulnerability and openness to change.
And our greatest love does come where we are open to the greatest personal change. Perhaps no one has more universal claim to our greatest love than our own child: One who can initially give nothing in return but who transforms our life and our identity completely -- I am now a mother, a father, my purpose in life has changed, my priorities rearranged. At our best as new parents we can be so transformed that the standard refrain is "I never knew I could feel so much love."
True love does not require that the other receive, or even know of that love. What is essential is not a change or response in the loved one, but a transformation in the lover, and this transformation can be the impetus to love as much as the result of it. Teachers, musicians and artists, public individuals: we can truly love those who cause us to think, understand or feel in new ways and open new worlds to us, even when they have no idea that they have done so. The gratitude for inspiring us to dig deeper, to become more, opens our hearts to love even when there is no true relationship.
But, how much greater the love when there is true relationship. If I love you, then I must be open to being changed by participating in your life, feeling with you, seeing as you see; and when I sense that you love me I know my experience has changed you too, and that you have willingly entered into my life and volunteered to understand what it is to see as I see and feel as I feel. We can neither of us come out of a love relationship unchanged, and therefore, cannot truly enter into a love relationship without being willing to be changed by it.
So, when I hear people asking why we can't just allow them to "love the sinner but hate the sin," or "accept the pastoral care of the church" without anticipating that the church will be transformed by the experience of its new members -- No, I don't see true love. You can't truly love and care for people you invite into the community without being open to being transformed by seeing as they see and feeling what it is to be them. To say "you are welcome in but we are not open to change" is not to welcome at all. And, yes, loving the previous outsider may turn the inside world upside down. First Gentiles were allowed into the church and centuries of certainty about what God meant in "the law" were transformed by their perspectives. Slaves were allowed in and, once people began to understand and see through their experience, theologies of man's relationship to other men underwent drastic revisions. When men finally sought to understand the world through women's eyes, some finally understood why the protestations of traditional patriarchy that they weren't paternalistic fell on generally deaf female ears. A new theology of a God that is neither male nor necessarily mediated through an all male priesthood began to become mainstream. And, yes, if we welcome in lesbians and gays, and transgender folks, and anybody else who is "different" from us in ways that maybe scare us, and if we really love them, we will continue to be changed by our love for them in ways that may now seem downright "wrong" but will not with our newly transformed eyes.
Certainty, fixed, unalterable, I'm right, you're wrong -- these are all words that are at odds with love. Where there is no openness to transformation, there is no love.
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