Global Centrum Chicago, RC, Global Priors Council August 27, 1974

THE THEOLOGY OF LOVE

The Ash Wednesday service has always left a great impression on me. One year, I remember the priest putting ashes on my forehead and saying, "From dust you came; to dust you shall return." Several days later, I rushed down the stairs in the morning and said, "Mother, Mother, didn't the minister say, 'From dust you came and to dust you shall return'?" "Yes," she replied. "Well," I said, "I looked under my bed this morning and there is somebody there, but I don't know whether he's coming or going." It is the same with the theology of love. It has been under the bed all these years, but when you begin to look at it, you cannot tell whether it is coming or going.

We were talking about Henry Aaron the other day, about the simple upbringing he had in the South. One of the problems he had in growing up was a fear of someone being under his bed at night, so he used to lie awake, worrying. He said his father did not counsel him about his deep fears hut dealt with them directly by putting his mattress on the floor. After this he never had a problem again. That kind of practical care is what we are talking about with love, and the theology of love. It is an event, I think, to those of us who are used to thinking hard about these things, Let me read to you the passage from the New Testament, that is where in retrospect I think I first began to think theologically in the context of love rather than faith. I remember very distinctly my encounter with this Scripture when we were first studying Gogarten. "Then one of the experts in the law stood up to test him and said, "Master, what must I do to be sure of eternal life?" "What does the law say and what has your reading taught you?" said Jesus. . . .but the man, seeking justification, said, ''Who is my neighbor?" … "you go and do the same," said Jesus.

For twenty years our articulation of our self­understanding has been in the context of faith. I still remember when I went to the PLC and was addressed by the fact that the category "Christian" was replaced by "man of faith." During the course, that term "man of faith" became filled full with meaning as a way of pointing to what it means to be the Church.

In more recent days, we have fallen into love. I find it interesting that our culture talks about "falling in love." It is not a rational decision; it is not sentimentality; it is an objective fall, like the fall into sin. It is: you "fall" in love. I believe we "fell" in love in Summer '71. I do not know what happened to you, but I discovered that my secular presuppositions were far deeper than my theological presuppositions. That is to say, I had more existential security attached to the form of the family, or to economic patterns, and such, and when in the course of doing the research of Summer '71 I saw that all those things were relative, and likely to change totally, that is when the bottom dropped out for me, far more radically than it did when it dropped out of my theological stance. In Summer '71, we fell in love with the Mystery, too. The next year, we fell in love with ourselves. I still remember how we talked about Summer '72; the visits to the Other World gave people back whole hunks of their past. I remember one man saying there had been four years he was a band leader in high school that he always hated himself for, that came back to him. The experience of falling in love with ourselves became dominant. This year, we have come to talk about falling in love with the world. We have discovered that we care about the world.

Now we must think through again, or rearticulate our self­understanding in the context of love. This is not to imply sentimentality or some interior quality. Much of our struggle this summer was to give articulation to love and that will be our struggle for a long. time.

Love is the expression of the authentic relationship between myself and other selves, between myself and the world, between myself and the Mystery. It's the expression of an authentic relationship. All of us have had any number of experiences where that has been grounded for us. One occurred to me last evening as I was working on this. I remember very clearly when I was a freshman in college, taking a course in Western Civilization. Every Monday we had movies in the auditorium and all the classes went. Sometimes we went, and sometimes we ditched. I remember showing up one time for the films and they were showing a captured German film from Dachau. I was totally unprepared for that experience. I can still see the soldiers with the wheelbarrows, wheeling them up to the side of a huge pit, and turning them over, and three or four or five bodies, just stacks of human bones, stark­ white, falling, falling on top of a mound of bodies. And my interior caved in. I was incapable of response. I cared about that. I think the way it came to my lips was "Never again."

What happened was that I discovered that the world in that film was the world I had on my hands; and it was my world. All of us have ways of talking about that experience, be it through the first encounter with the inner­city ghetto, or people who went on Global Odysseys; we have talked about this as the "dead pigeon experience." The experience has to do with the fact that all morality is preceded by the perception of a gap between what is and what ought to be, an objective perception. When you are struggling with justification or faith, you are struck by its absurdity. Under the rubric of love, you are struck not by absurdity, but by tragedy. Gogarten's word was doom. That is what strikes you. You are also struck by the clear sense that you are responsible. It is not at all rational that the suffering and the pain of that gap are mine to deal with and no one else's.

One always begins with faith, for unless he has come to terms with that gap by saying yes to it, then his attempts to love become attempts to do away with the gap. If I was a Roman Catholic, I am sure I would know the word for grace that allows me to be "a man of faith" in that situation and love, without knowing self-consciously that I am a man of faith.

In experiencing the gap, there are people who find the ability to love, though they would not in any shape or form call themselves self­conscious men of faith. Though the experience is not sequential, you always begin with faith when thinking this through.

Love is something everyman participates in, or it is not love. In that sense that love is ontological, it is not an achievement of a few, and moreover, as I said before, it is irrational. It is engagement it is participation. I think it is also true that our love is subject to reductionisms. That is, every man is not loving the totality of his life all the time. Loving the totality of his life means he loves others, loves self, loves the ground of being. Therefore our struggle with love is our struggle with overcoming our reductionisms. I think the bug model triangles give us a way to see what it means to love the totality of existence. The witnessing dimension of the triangles primarily get said what it means to love the self and to love the other. It has to do with doom, with hearing "the cry of brothers doomed to die," with "three billion people die and never live." We have pointed practically to witnessing love by saying, once you have perceived that you are loved, with a love that preceded you, that goes on after you, and once you have perceived that it is the ground of all being that you love, then you find yourself with the objective claim of all mankind upon you to articulate the word of life in such a way that every last human being across the face of the earth has the possibility of grabbing hold of his life. There are no barriers, no limits to that freedom. I think it is helpful that RS­I appears in the triangle because RS­I points to the fact that witnessing is a structural reality. Love is structural. We create the forms and structures for people which allow the journey in consciousness to go on. That is what witnessing love is about.

In justing love, we care for society, for the structures of society. In justing love we see the catalytic efforts of the People of cod directed at recreating the institutions of society for our time, or building the new social vehicle.

Primal community is the essence of what justing love is all about. When people ask me these days, "What is the Ecumenical Institute about ?" or "What is the ICA about?" I say we are interested in one thing, building primal community. And we are interested in doing that in local geographic neighborhoods and in all social institutions, including the church, schools, businesses, agencies, etc. In order to build up primal community, we have seen that we have to BE primal community 24 hours a day. That is what our Houses are about.

Presencing love has to do with love for the mystery. Obviously the key in presencing is the Religious. It is the ways and means we have found for occasioning awe, or living before the awe. At one point, we said everyman needs an experience of the awe every day. He does not need witness, in one sense. He does not need justice. What he needs is to have transparency before him­­ once a day. The Religious are about seeing to it that the disclosure of the Other World in the midst of this world HAPPENS. In the Local Church Experiment, and particularly in the past few years, we have created an incredible wealth of methods to do that. It is our care for the mystery and for ourselves, because it is care for the symbols.

None of these distinctions is absolute but the issue under the rubric of faith has to do with the meaning in life, with answering the question of why. The issue under love is how; how do I respond. Faith deals with coming to terms with the indicative of existence itself. Love has to do with coming to terms with the imperatives which emerge from the indicatives. Faith has to do with the consciousness of consciousness of consciousness. Love has to do with action

The witnessing dimension of life throws Universal Benevolence upon us. When you see there are no limits to your responsibility for mankind, as the Religious, you are required to be a guru, to embody RS­I all the time, for you never know when you have the responsibility of another human life on your hands. In this way, Universal Benevolence comes to the Religious. In the justing dimension, or in primal community, love requires the renewal of every local church. It requires that every local church, every congregation, cadre and parish be redone so that the word of life is present for any person to see, touch and taste. The justing dimension pushes radical integrity upon us. Justing love raises the issue of what must he done.

LENS was our response to witnessing love. For three years, we struggled with what social deed was required. We thought we had the content wrapped up. Then we discovered the social deed required was to create the process by which that very struggle would be available to every last human being. That is, LENS is about giving Indicative Battleplanning to every man, woman and child in the world. It seems that the intensification of the relationship between Radical Integrity and the Religious is the guildsman. It requires that the Religious in our time stick our utterly unrepeatable, hard­to­replace lives in some stupid, doomed local community. The Guildsman is very particular, radical expenditure, in the context of the whole globe.

Endless Felicity is the relationship of the Religious to the witnessing and the justing. To the Religious, witnessing becomes Popular Preaching. I think that we came closest to Popular Preaching in our mundanity spins this summer. It was almost like taking one of everything, which is what popular preaching is about. In talking about something that happened to him, usually in the last 24 hours, the lecturer in the mundanity spin summoned the awe, the transparency. I tell you lives were healed and issues were solved by those spins like nothing we have ever done before. It was the bleeding of Endless Felicity into our whole witnessing dimension.

Endless Felicity pushed into the justing dimension requires primal community as a social demonstration. Endless felicity emerges when you take a structure of society in which people live and work, experiencing life as sheer dread and terror, sheer waste, sheer dark night. The Religious go into that situation, either business, government, or whatever builds the methods and structures which allow people to understand what they are doing is human engagement, That is social demonstration. It creates presencing love.

I have played a bit with what "unlove" might be for the Religious. Sometimes people fall off on the witnessing dimension but do not hold the other two poles. They wind up being superficial. The trap is superficiality. They get trapped into neat formulas. The formulas, in one way, are true enough, but they fail to deal with the particularity of the people that they are working with. Or, they lose the depth that comes from the ongoing encounter with Awe that changes all formulas.

The other trap is winding up on the justing pole. We get re wed up to do a demonstration, but forget witnessing and presencing. We wind up being reduced. We wind up giving our whole being to some little ridiculous thing rather than on behalf of all. We stand in shallowness, not in the depth that comes from standing over against the Mystery.

The attempt to be presencing love without witnessing and justing is ridiculous. It is to fall into immediacy. It is to attempt to get immediate stillness, immediate timelessness, or immediate eternality. Love of God takes place in and through the Word, in and through the care for the world which means witnessing and justing love.

I discovered my whole life I had told the Good Samaritan story with the question, how do I come off like a Good Samaritan? How do I come off justified? When that question exploded the story for me, I saw that Jesus was not answering my question with the story­­ He was only concerned with the picture of a man of love. I spent years of fruitless speculation wondering how to deal with panhandlers who come to the door of the office. I was worrying out of the context of justification, probably because of my interpretation of the Good Samaritan. But the story was really about what a man of love looks like. The issue was what does it mean to be neighbor to the world.

Segundo's interpretation of the sheep and goats story is also helpful. He pushes us to see the issue has to do with engaging in the love or the care for the world, and that being the church has to do with being the ones who know, on the other side of engaging. Segundo says that the church in our time engages in care for the world with people who have all sorts of weird contexts for such engagement. They do not believe what we believe. They do not have the same presuppositions about their humanness that we do. The only thing that binds us to them is their concern to get food to the people who are hungry. As we move into these parishes, that is what we will find ourselves doing. We have talked abut what it means to be mated with unbelievers. We have talked about establishing long term relationships with Ceasars, federal governments, and people who do not believe any of the things we believe about humanness. That is what the sheep and goats Parable is about.

As we brood on the theology of love, our meditative council should include some old friends and some new ones. Those of you who were here this summer saw the Man of La Mancha as a new movie. It was new because we could see what that movie was talking about from the standpoint of love rather than faith. I experienced that movie the first time as utterly bewildering. It was an alien image to my theology. After 20 years of telling ourselves the way life is, Don Quixote gives a speech and says the worst thing of all was to see the way life is without seeing the way life should be. Everybody just collapsed. You know he is right, you intuit that he is right. Yet it shattered you if you have done any RS­I teaching at all.

Kazantzakis, another saint for these times, says that in coming to terms with faith, one must consider what the heart requires beyond the mind. The heart says "Damn! This gap is going to be filled up with the stuff of my being­even though it is impossible, even though it is hopeless. Nevertheless, that is my crusade. That is what my life will always be about."

We saw Cromwell this summer. In the film, Cromwell, having retired from life, is called back because of his care. Do you recall the line, "This nation is going to be governed if I have to do it myself." He will be a helpful figure for us as we continue to work with the theology of Love.

­­­­Ron Clutz

8/31/74