It’s Easter Sunday and I find myself writing at a Muslim-owned coffee shop. The irony is not at all lost on me.
I should acknowledge upfront that I’m writing about Christian ideas with the theological depth of someone who ain’t exactly creased the spine of a Bible in many a moon, and it would take only the slightest of pushback from friends of mine to expose just how out of my depth I am. Nevertheless, I retreat to the tried and true defense of the old saying: you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
I’ve been thinking about “Loving your neighbor as yourself” a fair bit lately. Admittedly, it comes from a place of not witnessing too much of it out and about these days. This only serves to highlight a fair bit of the hypocrisy that I see more and more of these days. And after all, much like the crimes of one William Henry Cosby Jr., it’s the hypocrisy that’s the worst part.
It is also important to acknowledge that I know very little about this subject on a theological level and am relying on my dear friend Claude to help me think about it. In this case, I had it pull together the contributions of a “diverse set of theologically sound thinkers.” It provided me the ideas of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, etc. But I was drawn to two in particular.
The first was a feller named Reinhold Niebuhr. Yes, Niebuhr. You cannot make this up. He argued that perfect neighbor-love is functionally impossible. We are con-sti-tu-tive-ly self-interested creatures, and any “love” we manage to produce is compromised by that fact at the outset. He called it the Impossible Ideal. Not all that compelling of an idea on its own, but there’s another feller that said this “Impossible” Ideal is indeed quite possible. All that it requires is that you strip away the Self. Regrettably, the Indeed Possible Ideal faced an uphill battle from a marketing standpoint.
Meister Eckhart, the second of the two thinkers that caught my eye, was a medieval German Dominican mystic who, surprisingly, never once played a game of baseball and who, unsurprisingly, was tried for heresy. His argument was that much of what we call Love is just self-love wearing a disguise. You love your family because they’re yours. You love your community because it’s yours. You love your neighbor because loving them reflects well on you or makes you feel not only warm, but also this weird kind of fuzziness. However, if you manage to strip away the Self (group identities, preferences/aversions, the need to be right, the fear of the Other, etc.) you reveal what’s been there the whole time and what Eckhart called the Grunt. The ground. Or in Minekwaftean tewms, Bedwock. The place where the Soul and God share the same floor. And since God is Love, the closer you are to that floor, the more Love moves through you. Not as something you generate, but as something you conduct.
If Eckhart’s assumption holds true, that the Grunt is real and that Love flows through the Self rather than from it, then it’s worth imagining what a certain arrangement of Self looks like. Nationalism. Machismo. Bloodlust. The fear of the Other dressed up as strength. A pre-Damascus Road certainty that You are waging God’s war on His behalf. Deus Vult etched in ink more lasting than a marriage (or two. All Polymarket bets are on three.) Each one further constricting the flow of God’s ocean of love. You know, a bit like a strait in that regard.
Anyways, just been chewing on neighborly love. But I digest.
Lose the Self and open the f-ing Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!
Praise be to Allah.