Are we eager to love, too?

Image: San Damiano Crucifix (replica) in Cathedral of St. Francis, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Christmas 2020

Lately I’ve felt drawn to learn more about Saints Francis and Clare and the Franciscan charism. This fall I plunged into the history of the movement by reading Paul Sabatier’s The Road to Assisi: The Essential Biography of St. Francis. It was a fascinating discovery of St. Francis’ life and legacy. I learned more thoroughly, for example, of Francis’ work to rebuild an institutional church increasingly adrift of Jesus’ message and morally corrupt. A passage reads:

His [Francis] preaching shows how scholastic influences has turned the Bible from a book of emotional and ethical truth into a book of scientific truth, and how a vast and minute ecclesiastical polity was hardening and drying the living tissue of the great religious organism.

In many ways, I’m not sure we’ve recovered from the “scholastic influences” and its undergirding Hellenistic philosophy. The dualism, rigidity, certainty, and propensity to cast out those who challenge the status quo, as they did to both Francis and Jesus in their day, points to the remarkable persistence of humanity’s inability to hold and lean into Holy Mystery. As then, and so now, we want it spelled out into tidy answers with punishable rules that rebuke the boundary-crossers.

In modern parlance: stay in your lane. Don’t rock the boat. Just be nice. Why do you have to be difficult? The list could go on. We know it well, don’t we? The fearful and the afraid cling to certitude. I’ve learned, though, that if we think we’re certain of God we don’t know God. God’s much bigger.

Richard Rohr, OFM, in his book Eager To Love argues that while much of religion today is focused on capital T Truth (read: juridical), there’s alternative approach, the Jesus approach which captivated Francis and his followers. This “third way” takes shape from the Beatitudes where the lowly and the least are first. It’s a “Beatitude spirituality” focused not on Kingship and imperialism, but surrender, solidarity and simplicity. The third way doesn’t center dogma, concepts and rules. It prioritizes Christian practice and relationship. Right relationship. Just relationship.

Some Tradition and Truth may be valuable, needed even, but it’s not the heart authentic Christianity. Remember, Jesus himself challenged his own legalistic, outsiders/insiders religion. Who spent the most time with Jesus in the Gospels? Not the “perfect,” that’s for sure. The broken-yet-beautiful were the chosen instruments of grace and transformation. The priestly class, recall, rarely got it.

God was so eager to love us that God became one of us in the form a Middle-Eastern Jew born in poverty and cast out from his native land. It’s telling, isn’t it, that God’s own being came not as royalty or the politically powerful but a meager and endangered outcast? Born alongside farm animals. In mess and mayhem. This is our Savior!?

Yes. We’d no doubt like it better if we could wrap ourselves up in the usual cloak of certainty and control and pledge allegiance to a God of rules, rigidity and retribution. A God of brute strength and a master of power, prestige and possessions. In other words, a God of human ego and superiority.

But let’s be clear: that’s not the God God chose to become. Fortunately, that’s not the type of relationship God wants with us. Miraculously, it was a tenderhearted, merciful God that became flesh and dwelt among us. A God of compassion. A God eager to love. Wholeheartedly. Unmerited and unconditionally. Radically.

Jesus was eager to love. Francis and Clare were eager to love. Are we eager to love?

Without moral pre-conditions and ideological litmus tests?

Honestly, I’m not eager to love those who enable so much division and discord. I’m not eager to love the demagogues who attempt to pit us against each other in the name of politics and religion. We’ve been stuck here for awhile, sadly. Sometimes it takes everything in us to have a civil conversation, let alone foster an eagerness to love. It is precisely there that my/our work to love must continue. After all, love has the power to transform. And if this moment is calling for anything, it is transformation. Who is it hardest to love? Begin there.

I’m reminded of a favorite hymn, I am For You, by Rory Cooney. Its words testify to a God who is for us even as we struggle to be for him/her and each other.

There is a mountain, there is a sea.
There is a wind within all breathing.
There is an arm to break every chain.
There is a fire in all things living.
There is a voice that speaks from the flame:
I Am for You,
I Am for You,
I Am for You is my name.

There was a woman, small as a star,
Full of the patient dreams of her nation,
Welcoming in an angel of God,
Welcoming in God’s bold invitation.
Let it be done, she sang, unto me:
I am for you, I am for you!
I am for you: let it be!

There was a man who walked in the storm,
Caught in between the waves and the lightning,
Sharing his bread with those cast aside,
Healing by touch the lost and the dying.
Sending us forth he says to his friends:
I am for you, I am for you,
I am for you to the end.

We are anointed servants of God.
We have been born again of spirit.
We are the word God speaks to the world,
Freedom and light to all who will hear it.
So let us be the word of the Lord:
I am for you, I am for you,
I am for you ever more.

There is a world that waits in the womb.
There is a hope unborn God is bearing.
Though the powers of death prowl the night,
There is a day our God is preparing.
Sing ‘round the fire to waken the dawn:
I am for you, I am for you!
I am for you: we are one!

(Copyright © 1992 GIA Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Let’s be eager to love, too. That’s the bold vision of Christmas: to see and love God in all of creation. It’s Incarnation, par excellence. It’s the primordial Sacrament that is Christ at work, especially in the already but not yet reality of God’s reign.

Life lived in such a way embodies the harmony of diverse voices singing, “I am for you, I am for you! I am for you: we are one!”

May it ring out for all to hear. This Christmas and in the new year.