Capacity to Love
Recognizing that no one else can complete us actually enhances our capacity to love and receive the love of others.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 293
Photo: Barefoot Park, Germany, July 2003
Category: Love
10 Posts
Righteous Anger
The real issue, though, is how to understand divine anger in the context of overwhelming graciousness and mercy. The danger is that within a patriarchal, punitive setting, speaking of a wrathful God has been used to justify holy wars and torture, hostility to outsiders, and debilitating guilt in sensitive consciences. But righteous anger is a different breed of cat. It is profoundly ethical. It waxes hot in moral outrage because something good is being violated. Arising from love, it awakens energy to act to change the situation. Editing a powerful book of photographs of African American women, Barbara Summers was struck by the creative power of anger of even the most accomplished of these women: “A truly beautifying discovery for me was to find so much love in anger. It was a fist-up, death-defying love that challenged the unfair conditions of life and muscled in on injustice as it nursed both sides of a nation.” This is not anger with the spirit of murder in it, but fury that is creative of life. Much feminist in-depth analysis, such as Beverly Harrison’s influential essay “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” makes clear that far from being the opposite of love, righteous anger is a vivid, moral form of caring that empowers transformation.
In the context of God’s graciousness and mercy, divine anger functions for justice. It bespeaks a mode of caring response in the face of what harms beloved human beings or the created world itself. “The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God it is a disaster,” writes Abraham Heschel. Divine wrath is a worthy response. True, it lasts but a moment; true, it is instrumental, aimed at change and conversion. But it stands as an antidote to sentimentality.
— Elizabeth A. Johnson, Creation and the Cross, p. 39-40
Photo: Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, July 3, 2017
Who Is In?
The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget — that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.
— Rachel Held Evans, Inspired, p. 186
Photo: Prague, July 16, 2004
Err on the Side of Loving People
I learned a long time ago that the most God-honoring, most Jesus-reflecting act is to err on the side of loving people. When you simply accept those around you in whatever condition they come to you, the table naturally expands and relationship happens and God does stuff that you couldn’t predict or control.
— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 43
Photo: Staffa Island, Scotland, July 13, 2003
We Come in Love
We come in love. I would submit that the teaching of Jesus to love God and love our neighbor is at the core and the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. And we must be people who reclaim Christianity from its popular modality, from the way it is often perceived and presented, to a way of Christianity that looks something like Jesus. And Jesus said, Love God and love your neighbor, so we come in love.
That is the core of our faith. That is the heart of it. And we come, because we are Christian and the way of love calls for us to be humanitarian. It calls for us to care for those who have no one to care for them.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. 60-61
Photo: Above Spittal an der Drau, Austria, July 29, 1998
Pride
Often, our pride stands in the way of our asking for help. In true love there is no place for pride. To love each other means to trust each other. If you don’t tell the person you love of your suffering, it means you don’t love this person enough to trust her. You have to realize that this person is the best person to help you. We need to be able to get help from the person we love.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love, p. 54
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 20, 2017
The Goal of the Law
Though many people assume that the primary message of the prophets was to call the people back to obedience of the law, the real message of the prophets was to call people back to the goal of the law, which was love. We see this by the fact that many of the prophets are quite critical of how the people ignore justice and righteousness in the land. The prophets show that many of the people are quite observant when it comes to the law, but they neglect the greater goals of care for the poor, protection for the weak, and love for the outcast. A quick reading of some key prophetic texts reveals that their true concern was not adherence to the law, but living according to love (cf. Isa 1:10-20; 61:8; Jer 14:12; Hos 6:6; Amos 4:4-5; 5:21-25; Mic 6:6-8). Jesus, as the greatest prophet, reveals this same truth through His life, ministry, and teachings.
— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 96-97
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, June 14, 2019
Letting Go in Love
Letting go is essential in love – it is the opposite of clinging to expectations about how things should be and allows us to accept others (and ourselves!) as they are.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 293
Delight in What’s Before You
God, right there, today, in the person in front of me, joy beyond holding, beholding this day, Paradise. You delight in what is before you today in Christ. Richard Rolheiser writes that, “the opposite of depression is not happiness, it’s delight.” After all, we breathe the Spirit that delights in our being. We don’t breathe in the Spirit that just sort of puts up with our mess. It’s about delight.
— Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 159
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 8, 2019
Love’s the Loudest Thing
I know that for many people of faith, maybe even for you, LGBTQ acceptance is still, in a very real way, a spiritual world rocker. I pray that if you are unsure how to respond to someone who comes out to you, you’ll take a cue from my father, who — despite all he didn’t know or understand in the moment — didn’t feel a pressing need to lecture, preach, or answer every question. He simply made sure that his love was the loudest thing he spoke. He didn’t realize it then, but he was showing me Jesus in a way that surprised and inspired and transformed me.
Friend, the heart of the bigger table is the realization that we don’t have to share someone’s experience to respect their road. As we move beyond the lazy theology and easy caricatures that seek to remove any gray from people’s lives, we can meet them in that grayness, right where they are, without demanding that they become something else in order to earn proximity to us or to a God who loves them dearly. Just as was true in the life and ministry of Jesus, real love is not contingent upon alteration, it simply is. There is no earning of fellowship or deserving of closeness; there is only the invitation itself and the joy that comes when you are fully seen and fully heard. When in Rome, you shouldn’t need to do as the Romans do in order to be welcomed. You are already welcomed.
— John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table, p. 18-19