Spirit of Love: Loving Self
This week, Brian McLaren rounds out a trio of chapters focused on the work of the Spirit and the work of Love and how those two things are inter-related.
His premise in these three chapters is that our connection to the Holy Spirit is a source of love, a reminder to love, a nudge toward love, a connection to God’s love.
When we are connected and paying attention to the Holy Spirit we are better able to fulfill the command to love God and neighbor.
He starts us off this week with this question:
“If love for God is always linked with love for others, and if we are to love others as we love ourselves, what does it mean to love ourselves?” (WMRBW, 221)
It’s a great question. One that deserves our reflection.
How is it that we tend our own hearts and bodies and souls enough to keep us “fit,” but not so much as to lose focus on God and neighbor?
How is it that our love is not self-serving or self-centered, but instead is a catalyst for loving action in the world?
How is it that our self-love and self-care do not focus us merely on our comfort and pleasure, but keep the generation of love for God and love for others at the center?
Let’s begin here:
Pleasure is not bad.
As American protestants, we have a legacy of demonizing pleasure. We have our roots in Puritanism, and more recently in a purity movement that has really stunted our development in some ways.
You see, God created us for pleasure.
And when we judge pleasure harshly, we find ourselves strained and starving. We might even find that depriving ourselves of pleasure makes our desire for pleasure overwhelming, tempting, beckoning, unhealthy, addictive.
We tend to long for what we cannot have.
So we might teeter between starvation and gluttony if we don’t develop a healthy relationship with pleasure.
Anyone else here manage to stay away from a package of Oreos for months at a time only to one day plow through nearly an entire package?
Maybe it’s just me…
Where do we turn in scripture for a better understanding of how we move in the world, finding the right balance of pleasure and purpose?
I suppose we could look to the rules – you know, those easy to follow ones. The 10 commandments up front and then all of those Levitical laws.
But rules only go so far. Rules are never quite as cut and dried as they might seem. There is often an exception to the rule, right?
This is where Wisdom comes into play.
McLaren suggests that WISDOM is the gift that helps us attend to the right balance. Wisdom is the way we graduate from a list of rules and begin to ask big questions to guide our steps in practical terms.
Let’s begin with a basic definition of wisdom for this conversation. The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms says wisdom is the:
Knowledge of what is good and true; the basis for knowing what is true and false…. It is an attribute of God and a gift of the Spirit.
I like to think of wisdom as the intersection of our lived experience, our understanding of the rules, the workings of the world around us, and the nudge of the Holy Spirit.
God acts and moves with wisdom.
And when we are at our best, we seek to act with a fraction of God’s wisdom. In this way, we seek to be operating more in God’s world – toward the Kin-dom – than in the “material world” or the secular world. We are IN the world and not OF it when we practice wisdom.
Our scriptures for today both offer some understanding of wisdom.
From Proverbs, we are introduced to a father’s instruction to his children, instruction that he received from his father.
The book of Proverbs is a body of wise teaching not so much drawn from the history of Israel but rather drawn from knowledge about God that is gained through experiencing the world around us and experiencing human nature over time.
A collection of teachings often attributed to Solomon, Biblical scholars now believe that Proverbs was authored by “sages,” a social class that served as counselors and teachers and bureaucrats during the period of the divided kingdom. These sages would have operated in a multi-cultural and multi-faith environment. They interacted with important people in a lot of different capacities.
In light of that, this collection of teachings reflect universal truths drawn from living in the world as it really exists, full of other folks with varying skills and educations and calls and faiths.
For these sages, their teaching is undergirded by an awareness that living wisely requires awe, obedience, and a proper relationship with God.
Then from the Letter of James, the author sets up two kinds of wisdom – there is earthly wisdom and Godly or heavenly wisdom. The letter warns against earthly wisdom, which is unspiritual and devilish. In contrast wisdom from above is pure, peaceable, gentle and full of mercy.
McLaren points to wisdom as the investment and growth that helps us to regulate ourselves in the world…to find the balance to understand what we truly need, what brings joy, and what might be too much. And when we develop wisdom, we avoid ruining our lives and the lives of others with greed or self-centeredness.
So where does our wisdom form? How do we become wise?
In the letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul’s greetings include this petition:
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
So…wisdom is a gift. And it comes from the Spirit. Which would suggest that we must nurture our connection to that Spirit in order to receive and cultivate wisdom. To love ourselves well, and in ways that help us love God and our neighbor well, we have to be in right loving relationship with ourselves. And we need wisdom to achieve that.
This takes us back a few weeks.
We’ve talked a bit about cultivating our connectedness to the Holy Spirit…about nurturing roots that connect us to the flow of the Holy Spirit’s movement and energy in every moment of our daily lives.
We’ve talked about putting ourselves in the presence of God with the intention of drawing closer.
We’ve talked about how we might need a small group of folks in our lives to hear our wrestling and help us to be accountable to a continued walk with God.
Today, as we think about loving ourselves SO THAT we are able to love God and others, I want to add or highlight a way of staying connected to the Spirit in order to cultivate wisdom to love ourselves appropriately.
That work is self-reflection. A chance to check in with yourself about what you are experiencing, what you are hearing, what you are feeling. Where is your heart reacting to what is before you right now? Where in your body are you feeling some sort of way about a decision before you or an action you are taking?
Created in the image of God, a God who has wisdom, we too can bear wisdom.
We build wisdom by paying attention to the world around us and the world inside of us.
This is the work. And when we start that work, we can better check in with our relationship to ourselves. Are we caring for our needs or indulging them? Are we experiencing pleasure or idolizing it?
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
May it be so.
Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment