To an Empowered Love

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

- 1 Corinthians 13

I never tire of reading St Paul’s great reflection on the gift of love in his first letter to the Corinthians. It is, in my opinion, the most profound and prophetic reflection in the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. It is also perhaps, in our contemporary post-Christian era, one of the few things he wrote that can still speak to us with any meaning or depth.

Paul himself underlined the difficulty of putting love into practice: elsewhere in his letters he is arrogant and boastful, is concerned to keep women in an inferior place in the nascent Christian community and hectors new converts to keep to his version of Christ’s Way, which he is certain is the only way despite people with other views.

Where Paul, with the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, could be said to have erred is his movement away from the core of his revelation of Christ, centred on love, towards certitude of belief. In his letters love is sometimes lost amid the need to organise and enforce a system of beliefs, to ensure that converts to the gospel align themselves to some ideas and not to others, and the need for unity of the right-thinking faithful. Love at times becomes secondary in his great missionary project.

What is love and how can it help us in the 21st century?

We tend to corral love in personal relationships and the family, but it reaches a lot further and is loaded with spiritual meaning, as Paul indicates in Corinthians. I would define love as the intention and act that benefits life. A loving person is one who consistently acts to support and nurture the creative force that is in all things. Though love can be communicated through words, it cannot be tied down to any set of ideas or beliefs; it exists as a higher-order value demonstrated only in its beneficial effects upon life.

When I think of the immense global environmental and social problems we face in the 21st century, only one solution comes to mind: love. When despair at human ignorance and greed overwhelms me, I look to only one way out: love.

Love is not passive, it does not imply a retreat from worldly concerns but is an engagement in the world on the terms of what brings most benefit in the widest possible embrace. Love has no boundary, no place where you can say it does not reach, no dark corner into which it cannot shine. We can lose sight of love, but it remains with us, ready, still.

Love provides energy and direction in dark times because it is solely about affirmation of life. As we go about our daily lives, the task is to stay anchored to love, to draw from it at every moment, and to return to it if we have lost our way.

Many of the issues facing humanity in the modern era revolve around a crisis of empowerment. Industrial, scientific and medical advances have given the human species immense power, even to the capability of destroying all life on Earth. But in our collective focus on power and on empowerment, we have often left little room for love. Perhaps that’s the immediate challenge facing our species – redressing the imbalance between power and love and becoming as proficient in love and its applications as we have in the sphere of power. That would necessarily mean many difficult decisions where we dampen our desire to control and master in favour of letting go, of accepting things just as they are, and of faith and humility before the greater power of the universe. Our narrow concern just for ourselves must give way to a larger, more expansive realisation of Self that embraces all life on Earth and encompasses the very mystery of being.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great synthesist of science and religion, said: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall master for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” If humanity has any future, and some say our time on this planet is now fairly limited because of the enormously destructive changes we have wrought, to love is where we need to go. The direction of our next stage of evolution must be to an empowered love.

This is not America

"This is not America" – I’ve heard this said many times in the media by activists in response to Donald Trump, condemning his right-wing policies and all for which he stands.

"This is not America", and I always think "Oh yes, it most certainly is." I reason that if the country in which I live, Australia, has its warts and barnacles, then America must have plenty too. Take the dominance of corporate power that makes democracy at the highest levels in the US an illusion, take economic inequality in the richest country in the world, take its urban ghettoisation and squalor, its addiction to gun-toting violence at home and military empire abroad, its race problems, history of slavery and genocide of Indigenous people.

All of these are surely America, as much so as all that is good about the place. In fact, how is it possible to say that the good outweighs the bad? If you are middle or upper-class you may not be directly exposed much to the ugliness, but it exists nonetheless. Trump, it seems to me, represents raw, naked power and the arrogance and stupidity that goes with it. That's as American, as the old saying goes, as apple pie.

The question for me is: How do we oppose the bad while not casting it as somehow alien to ourselves and the body of humanity as a whole? How do we fight Trump in a reasoned and mature way without denial and demonisation?

This points to one of the burdens that has come down to us from Christian civilisation – the absolute dichotomy between good and bad and identification with good at the expense of evil. Modern psychology takes a sharp knife to this simplistic approach: We are all capable of good and evil acts, it says, and the way through the opposites is a psychic acceptance and integration of all elements. When we accept our own capacity for evil, we may come to a point of integration that allows us genuine freedom to choose how we act, no longer trapped in binary opposition within ourselves and against others.

From this point of acceptance and love we can still fight the good fight, but there’s a qualitative change. We don’t exclude or dehumanise the evildoer because we see them as our self. Even as we act to stop what they are doing, we are conscious not to create an "us and them" picture that severs the fabric of humanity. The result is always an affirmation of wholeness rather than a negation; we ask, “What is it that I am affirming in this situation?” to guide us.

In its own uniquely contradictory way, the Christian tradition offers helpful insights. St Paul says in Ephesians 6:12, "Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh … but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." What Paul means is that we focus on combating the wrongness of actions and not the individuals involved, or in another formulation we look to the principles at stake and not to personalities. So much energy in the current opposition to Trump is sucked down into useless name-calling and shrillness.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-60s, in my view, showed a remarkable degree of maturity. Martin Luther King steadfastly refused to lower the tone of the movement in reaction to the hideous racism of the time, continually affirming the dignity and humanity of everybody – black and white, oppressed and oppressor – while acting decisively for a better society. That’s America, the kind we desperately need to see more.