Love as a Skill and an Attitude

I started rambling about love, and the pain that keeps us from loving, in the post at http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-addictions.html, and added to it at http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-pain.html. I am going to continue with that theme and will probably end up with a series of posts that seem disconnected, but I do intend to tie them together for those patient enough to keep reading over the next several weeks.

At http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/love-that-never-dies.html we discussed the love that is really liking something or someone. While I want to be loved with that kind of love (in other words, I want to be liked), I really need the kind of love which the Greeks describe with agape. 

We read in I John 4:8 that "God is love". It's a statement of equivalence and it is a definition. That same word agape that is used 116 times in the Greek New Testament and is rendered in the old King James Version as charity, which back then really wasn't such a bad translation of it. Yet, agape is more than what we typically mean by charity today.
Love is not an emotion; it is an attitude. It is thing of the head more than of the heart. It is a point of view. It is, as Eric Fromm relates in his The Art of Loving, an interpersonal creative capacity that is characterized by care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. If I love you, I care about you, I take responsibility for your welfare, I respect you, and I get to know you and about you so that I CAN actually take that responsibility.
Essentially love is non-directional. If I love you I must also love the guy across the street. If love you, but not him, then the very reason that I don't love him shows that my love has conditions attached: it is a "love" that operates only if its Object fulfills certain requirements. That then renders my "love" as a business transaction. That isn't love. I either love everyone, or I love no one. Moreover, a corollary is that I love them no matter what they say, what they think or what they do. I may not love what they say, think or do, but I love them in any case. This, of course, requires separating the person from the behavior and realizing that a person is not his behavior.

The next time I write on this, I want to explore the concept of God as the personification of love.

 

The Pain That Keeps Us From Loving

The drive for security, pleasure and power, discussed at http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-addictions.html, are addictions.  They masquerade as “needs”, but I really have only a few physical and psychological needs. I read in I Timothy 6:8 “If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content.” If I have what I need to eat and I have protection from the elements and other dangers, physically what else do I need?  Of course this takes for granted that I have fresh air to breathe and the rest and relaxation I need.  In addition, I am hard wired with the need to be loved and to be needed as William Glasser taught in his writings.  

Ken Keyes, Jnr, in various works, explained that these addictions trigger separating emotions. When I feel I am not getting my security, pleasure or power wants met, then I experience emotions that are me refusing to accept what is going on.  I might be afraid, bored, irritated, angry, or any of several other emotions that say I don’t enjoy it. 

My thoughts, filtered through and shaped by these security, pleasure and power addictions lead to separating emotions (instead of unifying emotions as Keyes called them).  Emotions lead to action.  Action, when repeated, leads to habits. Habits shape character, and character shapes thoughts.  So, if I am allowing myself to just be my natural self, I am locked into a cycle that is rife with problems.  This mind is what the writer Paul describes as a “corrupt nature” or the “fleshly mind”, depending on how we choose to translate the Greek language in which he wrote it.  Romans 8:7-8: “This is so because the corrupt nature has a hostile attitude toward God. It refuses to place itself under the authority of God’s standards because it can’t. Those who are under the control of the corrupt nature can’t please God.” So, this attitude of unbridled security, pleasure and power addictions --- the way I naturally am --- is hostile toward God and will not subject itself to his standards.  I plan to discuss that in a later posting.

Yes, my natural mind IS a problem for me.  My security, pleasure and power addictions trigger emotions that are definitely not happiness.  They ruin my peace of mind, and these emotions are painful.  They demand my attention.  They render me self absorbed. This focus on the pain of my unfulfilled wants keeps me from loving, both others and myself.

Further, these emotions induce me to action, and that action is my effort to try to manipulate situations to control their outcomes. That whole focus does nothing for my peace of mind.  It is selfish and not promoting love. Thankfully there is resolution, but that is for later discussion….

My Missing Head and the Discovery of Death

It’s been a long time since I’ve been down the road I’ll now describe. So long that it is a very vague memory. So vague that I have to make assumptions about me having made that journey. That road is the understanding of the syllogism that says “All humans are mortal. I am a human. Therefore I……well that is…..I….am…..ummm….well you know…..mortal.” 

It seems to me that it took some higher thinking and some assumptions to validate that syllogism.

First, I had to distinguish the set called “humans”. How highly functioning must the thought processes be to recognize humans?  Does a fly cognitively differentiate a human from a cat?  Does a mouse?  I think dogs do.  Dogs likely can distinguish many sets from each other: food dishes, leashes, canine butts.

At some point I made the discovery that things are not always permanent. Food disappears off of the plate. The TV show ends. The sun goes down. Dad goes away for the day. A piece of wood disappears within the flames of a campfire. Probably by such observations, I saw that the status quo changes. The permanent disappearance of humans I knew, combined with somewhat fantastic explanations of death convinced me somewhere along the way that humans do not exist forever.

Third, I had to conclude that I am human despite experiencing myself very differently from how I experience those of you who obviously are human. For example, from within a void above my shoulders I notice things through this giant frameless window through which I see the world. On each the left and right side of my view there is a fuzzy almost nose-shaped thing. Apparently I have two noses if they even are noses. Humans seem to be lacking this big window. Instead, they each have a head, which is a hairy ball with lots of holes and only one nose.  I can see that I have shoulders, and when I reach my hand up above my shoulders to detect a head, the void swallows up my hand.  Nonetheless, eventually I did come to accept, by some leap of logic, or perhaps by brainwashing, that I am human.

Then came the unpleasant realization of the final step in the syllogism. Unpleasant because it triggered the security centre of consciousness discussed yesterday (http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2016/12/my-addictions.html). I don’t recall the moment of that dawning. I don’t know where I was.  Maybe the afternoon of my first funeral.  I must have been about 4 or 5 and was taken by the lady babysitting me to that funeral. I do recall coming back in a state of slightly stunned contemplation.

I think I quickly moved on from that realization. I am pretty good at refusing to acknowledge consequences. And this one is a complicated one, made so by my discovery that perhaps the best attested fact of ancient history is the resurrection of Y’shuah, the son of Yousef and Miriam.

Sir Edward Clarke, a British High Court judge who conducted a thorough legal analysis of the testimonies attesting to the resurrection, and by that I mean as a lawyer he applied the Rules of Evidence to the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, pretending that they were witnesses called on trial to testify to this, had this to say: “To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling.  As a lawyer, I accept the gospel evidence unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts that they were able to substantiate.”

The Guinness Book of Records lists as the most successful trial lawyer in history a man by the name of Sir Lionel Luckhoo, twice knighted by Queen Elizabeth, a man who had 245 consecutive murder acquittals.  That’s why he’s the most successful trial lawyer in history. This former justice and diplomat subjected the facts of the resurrection to his own painstaking examination for several years before declaring “I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.”

As British theologian Michael Green said “The appearances of Jesus are as well authenticated as anything in antiquity. There can be no rational doubt that they occurred, and that the main reason why Christians became sure of the resurrection in the earliest days was just this. They could say with assurance ‘We have seen the Lord.’ They knew it was he.”

Yes, it’s an amazing world in which carpenters get resurrected.