Harnessing the Power of Love

by
Ingrid Shafer

We are interpreters who create or at least co-create what we consider "reality" in and through the active matrix of our imagination and pre-understanding. That matrix, in turn, is not fixed. It developed in the context of a particular cultural tradition and community, and is constantly being calibrated in light of the ongoing experience. For those within or at least affected by the cultural domain of the West, the interplay of two contending, coherent, and internally consistent theoretical paradigms constitutes the way they understand themselves and their worlds. In practice, these two models are usually mixed, generating a plethora of gradations along a sliding scale between extremes. Nevertheless, most thinkers tend to follow one approach more than the other. These models are as ancient as Parmenides and Heraclitus, a static, one-dimensional, absolutist, closed either-or model that values perfection/completion/the past/permanence/ convention/unity, and a dynamic, non-absolutist, multi-dimensional, open both-and process model that values growth/evolution/change/the future/ novelty/diversity. The former operates primarily through vertical monologue and criticism. The latter operates primarily through horizontal dialogue and empathy. The former insists on sharp boundaries, and by definition excludes the "other" by any name. The latter has permeable boundaries, and can include the former. The statement, "May you live in interesting times" is a curse according to one and a blessing according to the other.

These paradigms are closely related to David Tracy's two master modes of religious interpretation that can be traced throughout the history of Christianity: the "analogical and dialectical languages" (408). The Analogical Imagination (of manifestation) sees, seeks, and expresses "similarity-in-difference" (413). It originates in the experiences of "trust, wonder, giftedness," albeit not as the "cheap grace" of dead univocity but the genuine grace of emergent--and hence uncertain --possibility: the "radical mystery empowering all intelligibility" (413). The dialectical imagination (of proclamation) sees, seeks, and expresses difference-in- similarity; it is rooted in the experience of "prophetic suspicion" (416), the Word of Jesus Christ as "disclosing the reality of the infinite, qualitative distinction between that God and this flawed, guilty, sinful, presumptuous, self-justifying self" (415). The dialectical imagination denies "all claims to similarity, continuity, ordered relations" (415). Until the Reformation both paradigms were part of the Catholic tradition. After the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics have tended to separate along analogical and dialectical party lines, even though the both modes are still found across the Christian spectrum and (ironically) the Catholic hierarchy (in contrast to the majority of the laity) has tended to follow the absolutist and dialectical paradigms. Furthermore, these two modes of seeing do not only hold for religious thought; they inform our total response to existence, our moral and aesthetic values as well as the manner in which we conduct our practical lives.

In his introduction to Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), John Thompson distinguishes between hermeneutics as the "restoration of a meaning addressed to the interpreter in the form of a message" (6) and hermeneutics as the "demystification of a meaning presented to the interpreter in the form of a disguise (6). The former respect the symbols "as revelation of the sacred"; the latter distrust symbols as a dissimulation of the real" (6). Obviously, if one of these interpretive schemes is considered totally right and the other totally wrong, they yield incompatible results. The potential for conflict increases once we superimpose these interpretive spectacles on other ideological bifurcations. Cacophony, however, can be transformed into dynamic, fugal harmony if the interpretive schemes are allowed to play with, around, off, and against one another, each simultaneously enriching and complementing the other(s), in other words: to relate in the spirit of love. In love, humanity has a universal translator that can serve as gateway into all knowledge, scientific and humanistic, a bridge that potentially connects us not only to other people and their myths, but to others in general--plants, animals, nature, conceivably the entire cosmos. Love is the channel that links us with what theologians call The Other. Love also allows us to get and remain in touch with ourselves. Love, however is currently out of favor among scholars.

Wendy Doniger describes her ideal historian of religion as a hunting sage, the "sympathetic scholar," one who in the metaphoric language of Indian aesthetics "acknowledges his need to live both in the head and in the heart" (12), noting concerning Western scholarship that "Criticism is more wissenschaftlich than praise in all academic disciplines, but particularly in religious studies. Since the Enlightenment, hatred . . . has been a more respectable scholarly emotion than love, . . . (18).

"Great art," according to John Gardner, "celebrates life's potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love" (83), adding, "'Love' is of course another one of those embarrassing words, perhaps a word even more embarrassing than "morality," but it's a word no aesthetician ought carelessly to drop from his vocabulary. Misused as it may be by pornographers and the makers of greeting-cards, it has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist" (83). In Belonging to the Universe (1991), Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast links the yea-saying of love to horizon experience and divinity: "God as ultimate horizon holds everything together. In this sense, God is the great 'Yes' to belonging that holds everything there is together. But this is another way of saying 'God is Love.' Love is precisely this: the 'yes' to belonging. This 'yes' is the word lovers say to each other. It is the most creative of all words" (108)--and this is precisely what James Joyce hints at when he concludes Molly's culminating 1610 line stream of consciousness soliloquy at the end of Ulysses ([1922] 1986) with "yes I said yes I will Yes" (644).

The word love is rarely found in current theological literature (though it lurks beneath such academically respectable terms as limit-experience and desire), and would seem absurdly out of place in texts on the scientific method (except, perhaps as a potential source of trouble). This dismissal is unfortunate, because love is a universal and ancient way of passionately empathetic being-knowing-acting that can not only span the "great divide" between science and religion but can serve to facilitate conversation involving the most diverse and hostile positions. It is not accidental that the ancient Greeks coined the term philosophy--love of wisdom, and we should not forget that theology and the sciences separated out of the philosophical root. I emphatically do not mean by love the blind emotion unregulated by reason that Karl Popper criticizes--while turning it into a bit of a straw man in the process (236). I argue that anything we call love that can lead to possessiveness, hatred, and violent conflict is not love at all, but an avaricious imposter--Plato's Alcibiades- -masquerading as love. I use the term avaricious instead of selfish because love for the other is legitimately linked to love of self and could be seen as a benign form of selfishness. Avarice, on the other hand, only wants what it wants, ultimately without regard for the other or any others that stand in its way. I agree with Swami Vivekananda who wrote a little over a hundred years ago "It is better not to love, if loving only means hating others. That is no love. That is hell! If loving your own people means hating everybody else, it is the quintessence of selfishness and brutality, and the effect is that it will make you brutes" ([1907] 1972, 1:474).

By love I mean an approach to life that focuses on reciprocity, mutuality, connectedness, interdependence. Love views the other as process of becoming, wills the best for the other from the other's perspective, and does so in such a way that both one's own integrity and the other's otherness are preserved. If that other is a human being, love refrains from violating the other's autonomy by trying to force the other into a mold. This, I argue, is the meaning of Jesus' injunction to love God, ourselves, our neighbors, and--especially--our enemies. This kind of respect for diversity grounded in love can be found in several religious traditions. During the third century B.C.E., for example, the Buddhist King Ashoka expressed it in rock edicts such as the following: "Concord, therefore, is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the law of piety as accepted by other people" (Rock Edict XII cited in Zimmer 497). What I call "love" also appears to inspire Peter Donovan's nuanced response to the odd alliance of atheistic postmodernists and conservative Christians for the joint bashing of religious pluralism as European Enlightenment imperialism (218). Referring to both Ashoka and John Stuart Mill, Donovan points to the necessity of taking "account of all sides of an issue" and in the process "keep the way open for the enlargement of spirit which comes through the interaction of competing ideas . . . (229). In fact the interaction of competing and complementary ideas is an intellectual model of the traditional physiological- psychological activity of "love-making" which in its root-meaning joins men and women whose union can produce new life, the biological equivalent of enlargement of the spirit.

My understanding of the term love is very close to Bernard Lonergan's. In Method in Theology, Lonergan argues that love is rooted in a sense of connectedness, a "prior 'we.'" He notes that "just as one spontaneously raises one's arm to ward off a blow against one's head, so with the same spontaneity one reaches out to save another from falling. Perception, feeling, and bodily movement are involved, but the help given another is not deliberate but spontaneous"(1). This spontaneous act of protecting another can grow into willing the good of a person, and that will Lonergan equates with loving the person in Insight (699). When love of persons expands to include the universe it means willing not "the clockwork perfection of mechanistic thought but the emergent probability of the universe that exists. It is not to demand that all things be perfect in their inception but to expect, and will that they grow and develop" (699). He concludes that good will is joyful, and "as emergent probability, it ever rises above past achievement. As genetic process, it develops generic potentiality to its specific perfection. As dialectic, it overcomes evil both by meeting it with good and by using it to reinforce the good" (700).

Elaborating on Pascal's well known remark that the heart has reasons which reason does not know, Lonergan differentiates among the first three levels of cognition, of experiencing, of understanding, and of judging. "Finally," he adds, "by heart I understand the subject on the fourth, existential level of intentional consciousness and in the dynamic state of being in love. The meaning, then, of Pascal's remark would be that, besides the factual knowledge reached by experiencing, understanding and verifying, there is another kind of knowledge reached through the discernment of value of a person in love" (114). Lonergan connects this fourth level with the new beginning of falling in love, noting that "in religious matters love precedes knowledge and, as the love is God's gift, the very beginning of faith is due to God's grace" (122-23).

When I speak of love, I also think of Martin d'Arcy who argues that the perfection of love "is to be found in personal friendship whether between a man and a woman, between man and man or between man and God. When God revealed himself as love, the last fear was removed from man's heart. Neither God nor nature nor other human beings were enemies and a menace. They could all be looked at with interest and love, and in the case of persons, love could be mutual. Even Eros, if it knows its own nature, can go with Agape" (31-32).

Loving lets us see ourselves as parts of a dynamic whole, as related in an expanding spiral through those closest to us to all of humanity and beyond. Loving offers the key to what Ralph Burhoe calls transkin altruism: it allows us to consider all of humanity our family. In a similar vein, Steindl-Rast speaks of the medieval Pax Benedictina holding "the world together as an Earth Household" (71). Love sees complementarity where indifference or hatred see antagonism. Love is inclusive rather than exclusive and not only experiences/ weaves/projects reality in terms of both-and, it even understands why others insist on either|or.

After Auschwitz and Nagasaki it is difficult to justify not only faith in a loving God and orderly universe, but even a continued linking of meaning and truth. Human life seems a "tale told by an idiot," or worse still, no tale at all but merely a random assembly of isolated events pointing nowhere, Yeats' falcon adrift in space. In the first part of this century both existentialists and positivists began to envision human beings as isolated atoms with no meaningful connections either to one another or the past. By mid-century those alienated atoms were busy translating rootlessness into cosmic ruthlessness. More recently, Alasdair MacIntyre depicts the prevalent self-image of the intellectual as a schizoid division into at least two irreconcilable realms--that of the human cog caught helplessly in bureaucratic organization and that of the private individual desperately trying to escape all social constraints (31-33). We live in the first epoch of human history in which we can see clearly that we have the power to annihilate the world, and that we can do so either with a nuclear bang or an ecological whimper.

Still, foolishly, some would say, the human animal continues to hope. Otto Rank interprets this quest for meaning as the human need for the crutches of illusion; Ernest Becker considers it the "vital lies" without which we would lack the strength to live. Like Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, such thinkers are certain that we must choose between truth or meaning, and cannot have both. Some, such as Becker or Loyal Rue with his Grace of Guile, accept the necessity of the (noble) "lie" as essential for a relatively healthy psychic life and survival. Others decry the tendency to hope, the Jamesian "will to believe" as vicious forms of "false consciousness."

In the face of this cynicism I call BOTH to faith in hope AND faith that faith in hope is neither a deliberate "noble lie" nor self-deception but empirically grounded in the experience of loving action, particularly if we allow the experience to help us view ultimate reality as essentially gracious. In unconditional caring for the other, truth and meaning are reconciled, God becomes possible again, and we become fully human. As Philip Hefner notes (agreeing with John Hick), loving action for its own sake confers "genuine personhood" on those who do what they consider virtuous for no reason other than its intrinsic value (208). Thus it is precisely against the backdrop of the Holocaust, in the extraordinary actions of selfless love performed by ordinary people, that Mordecai Paldiel finds evidence for the cosmic principle of hesed (the principle of compassionate love which, in cooperation with zedek, righteousness, creates and sustains the universe) breaking into everyday life and somehow deactivating supposedly universal responses of self-preservation (97-98). Paldiel's discussion of the practice of hesed is important both as earthly hint of gracious transcendence and as manifestation of the kind of undiluted love toward others that grounds human experience and is capable of dialogically joining opposites.

The theologian might call it God's kingdom breaking into the everyday. That is certainly what appears to have caused the metamorphosis of would-be war-profiteer Oscar Schindler into unlikely savior of more than fifteen hundred Jews between 1943 and 1945 (Gilbert 777). On a grand scale it is the equivalent of Lonergan's spontaneous stretching out of one's hand to keep a stranger from falling. It attests to a psychological layer of Lonergan's "prior we." Paldiel calls it an "impulsive type of altruism," an "immediate response to help a kindred human being in distress--come what may--even at great potential risk" (93). Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein describes what many would call "unnatural" humane responses to the reduction of life to a brute struggle for survival. Auschwitz officials tried to discourage prisoner flight by randomly selecting groups of inmates to be put into a dark cell where they would be left without food or water until the escapee was caught or the hostages had starved to death. This policy led to acts of heroic love, such as the well known self-sacrifice of Maximilian Rajmund Kolbe, a priest who has since been beatified for his willingness to die for another. Parenthetically, unless there is strong evidence that Kolbe changed his views of Jews during his internment I consider him quite unfit for official sanctity since he was a well-known anti-semite and hence entrenched in the very strand of Christian tradition that contributed to the Holocaust. Less publicized is the case of Marian Batko, a college physics teacher from ChorzĒv who volunteered for darkness and starvation on April 23, 1941. Four days later he died (Langbein 277-78).

While the extreme conditions of the death camps desensitized inmates to suffering in themselves and others it also became the occasion for the practice of altruistic love from the smuggling of food to written communication and words of warning--all potentially punishable by death. Comparable acts of self-sacrificing altruism can be found in every extreme situation, such as the Los Angeles riots and even the recent flooding in our Midwest.

Every culture is held together by, or grounded in, certain kinds of primordial structures, certain shared and unique-to- that-community ways of relating to what is considered ultimate reality as well as other members of the particular society. At an even more basic level, however, we can discover something radically human beneath the diversity of customs, rationalities, and traditions, and it is this fundamental quality of shared humanness which constitutes an over-arching or underpinning bond connecting even the most distant worlds across time and space. Anthropologists, such as Paul Ekman have demonstrated that facial expressions and body language relating to surprise, joy, anger, fear, sorrow, disgust, dominance, submission, sexual intercourse, and mother-infant interaction are universal. So is the simple smile, as Lonergan notes. He calls smiling an intersubjective communication of meaning that occurs in "an enormous range of variations of facial movements, of lighting, of angle of vision. But even an incipient, suppressed smile is not missed, for the smile is a Gestalt, a patterned set of variable movements, and is recognized as a whole. The meaning of a smile is global" (59).

Shared humanity lies at the deepest, pre-conscious or almost pre-conscious archetypal levels of individual and corporate experience which manifest themselves through images, symbols and rituals, and which are most easily approached by appealing to the analogical imagination, the narrative faculty. As Cardinal Newman's motto tells us: Cor ad cor loquitur: "heart speaks to heart." These primordial experiences can provide us with a rudimentary universal vocabulary of certain "tones" or "hues" containing variations of responses to such universal human experiences as being born/giving birth, frustration of desires, sexual maturing, fascination and falling in love, bonding or marriage, cosmic consciousness, loss and separation, watching others die, and, finally, dying oneself. Those emotions/embryonic narratives are pre-cognitive or tacit, to use Polanyi's term; they precede (and inform) the rational labeling process. Once the shared "vocabulary" has been established the conversation (though halting) may proceed because the outsider has been touched on a fundamental human level and a new language of understanding and evaluating can start to take form. In addition, there is the most radical level of all, that of mystic contemplation with its cross-cultural archetypal symbols, such as the portal (165).

On the level of praxis, the hermeneutics of love--looking at all we see through loving eyes, listening to all we hear with loving ears, sensing all we touch with loving hands (as well as being open to the love of others) does not eliminate suffering and evil, but it makes it bearable and allows us to stop the vicious cycle of injury-retribution. When we look at the world through lenses of love we see that beyond difference, beyond individuality, beyond fragmentation there is not sterile sameness but organic interconnectedness.

Civil Rights lawyer Morris Dees describes what happened in a courtroom when a member of the Ku Klux Klan confronted the mother of the young man he and others in his group had lynched to send a signal to the legal establishment that black members were not acceptable on any jury. This was a civil suit for damages, since an all-white jury had already found the defendants innocent of murder charges. Beulah Mae Donald had been quietly rocking back and forth throughout the proceedings. Suddenly, one of the defendants faced the woman and began speaking. He said he was sorry, he said he would spend the rest of his life paying damages, and he concluded with "'I want you to understand that it is true what happened and I'm just sorry that it happened.'" At that point "Beulah Mae Donald stopped rocking. 'I forgive you,' she said softly'" (329). It is important to note at this point that the kind of love I am suggesting is NOT identical with playing compliant doormat to the stomping boots of despots. It has much in common with Mohandas K. Gandhi's satyagraha--truth force--that non-violently stands up to injustice and does so with passionate intensity and quiet strength.

To loving eyes there is no crime, no sin, no evil beyond forgiveness and redemption. Paradoxically, this attitude helps victims at least as much as those who have transgressed against them. Calls for "victim's rights" generally equate those rights with "no parole for offenders" or "a life for a life." Year after year victims or the family members of victims attend parole hearings and sit in court rooms during appeals, nursing their pain and hatred, keeping the wound open, calling for justice, instead of letting go of the bitterness and allowing their wound to heal. They don't realize that their cry for revenge is no different from the mindset that perpetuates ethnic warfare in such places as the Balkans where people can't forget the wrongs of the past. As Andrew Greeley notes at the conclusion of the Friendship Game, if the human species is to survive, relationships between people of different groups must involve "some trust, some invitation, some promise, some gift-giving, some delight, perhaps even some faint touches of ecstasy. There is not other way that man knows how to conquer terror, and terror is the root of hatred." He goes on, "To put the matter more bluntly, in the modern world friendship is not optional. And so, whether we like it or not, all of us have to learn to love one another" (159). When Jesus told us to love our enemies he gave us the key to liberate us from the vicious circle of hatred engendering hatred. And Jesus is certainly not the first to do so. In the Western classical tradition, one of the most powerful examples of both the destructive force of hatred/revenge and the healing power of love/empathy can be found in Homer's Iliad. In Book 24, Priam, the Trojan king, comes into the enemy camp to ask that his son's body be returned for proper burial. He kneels before Achilles who has killed Hector to avenge the killing by Hector of Achilles' best friend, Patroclus. Achilles' thirst for vengeance is so great that killing his friend's killer is not enough; he wants to subject Hector's soul to eternal torment by having the corpse lie unburied to be torn to bits by carrion eaters. Somehow, the limit-experience of shared grief allows those two men to transcend hatred, and Achilles' fury dissolves into mercy as the enemies weep together for their lost loved ones.

Shared grief, weeping together for lost loved ones takes on special significance after the Oklahoma City bombing and our national day of mourning. By odd coincidence I had read a colleague's paper dealing with right-wing, militant racists known as "identity Christians" at the national 1994 Popular Culture Association conference in one of the culture-religion panels I chair exactly one week before the attack on the Oklahoma City federal building. Lin Collette, the paper's author, was unable to attend, and I had suggested that I read the paper for her because the topic seemed critical. Consider what Pastor Dave Barley wrote in November 1992. The citation comes from America's Promise, one of the publications that cater to this radical minority:

Hardly a day goes by that I do not receive a phone call alerting me to the fact that the DEA, FBI, Federal Marshals, or some military branch (such as Interpol/International Police) is going to and fro, seeking who [sic] they may devour (1 Peter 5-8). Some people feel a roundup is occurring and that those who are captured could possibly be placed in concentration camps which are READY TO SERVE US!

This comment reflects the way members of such groups generally view the federal government. The paranoia is on the surface, and it is possibly THE main force driving the violent rhetoric and actions. They see themselves in a state of undeclared war, called upon to defend what they consider their sacred rights. Wanton disregard for human life is equally unacceptable if it is officially sanctioned. Bungled attacks, such as the one on Waco, give a veneer of legitimacy to the ravings of the far right wing. Collette cites Ivan Sahlman's statement in the July/August 1994 issue of Jubilee (another hate publication) that federal authorities were in Waco and Idaho (Randy Weaver's home in August 1992) to "sharpen the skills they will repeatedly be called upon to use to utterly destroy the freedom of religion, and of our many other freedoms in this country." And, of course, the fatal mixture of fear, fanaticism, and fundamentalism manifests itself all over the world.

I can think of few more powerful contemporary symbols for the practical necessity to transcend and transform suspicion with and through love than the thousands shot in Rwanda, the human misery in Zaire, the murderous hatred in the Balkans, and that instant mass tomb in Oklahoma City. "We must love one another or die," writes W. H. Auden, or, in the words of Professor Swidler, "Death or Dialogue."

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