Not Always Knowing Where We’re Going

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At my age, it’s hard to remember being a parent of young children. A recent visit by my son, his spouse and two children, one and three years old, was a reminder. If you’re good at it, as my son and his wife are, you are constantly sacrificing your own time and space for the children, dropping whatever you are doing to tend to their needs.

For me, it is close to the kind of love prescribed for all of us in Jewish and Christian traditions, the kind of love I believe is needed for people searching for God.

This love isn’t extraordinary, however, because it’s the love that normally exists between parents and children. Indeed, this kind of love is evident among many species of animals. What is extraordinary is this kind of love for people other than family members.

So is this going to be one of those syrupy pieces about love, the kind that turns many people off? I hope not. I acknowledge that for many of us, the two “greatest commandments” of the Jewish and Christian Bibles - love of God and neighbor - are enigmas. How can you really love God, whom you can’t see or feel or touch, whom theologians and religious people acknowledge is unknowable? And am I really expected to love everybody?

Far From Syrupy

Questions that many of us have asked. But, yes, the prescription for love in the Jewish Bible and repeated by Jesus in the Christian Bible would apply this familial love to God and to everybody. When you consider the difficulty of following this formula – to love God and neighbor - you realize it’s far from the syrupy descriptions of love in romance novels, popular songs or especially, in religious books and videos. And you understand why so few are willing to embrace it.

Those of us struggling to believe may tend to overemphasize the value of intellectual faith and underestimate the value of love. Tomas Halik, the Czech theologian and philosopher, writes that “God doesn’t particularly care whether we believe in him or not. …Or more precisely, he doesn’t care about our faith in the sense that the term is often used, namely that to believe in God is to be convinced of God’s existence.”

Tomas Halik

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What really matters to God, writes Halik, is “whether we love him,” whether we have a faith “that is fundamentally associated with love.” 

“Faith without love is hollow,” Halik writes; “indeed, it is often no more than a projection of our wishes and fears, and in that respect many atheist critics of religion are right.”

All this is in Halik’s new book, “I Want You to Be,” subtitled “On the God of Love.” He acknowledges that the term “love of God” sounds “just as absurd to many of those around us as the words “love of one’s enemy.”

He defines love as “self-transcendence,” and asks, “What is more radical than to abandon self-absorption – which is especially pronounced nowadays – in favor of an ‘absolute mystery (i.e., God)?”

This kind of love, he maintains, supersedes mere belief.

“Committed Christians” may criticize others who have doubt, who struggle with unbelief, as if the essence of faith were simply a matter of believing. But Halik points out that faith in the original biblical sense is “not a matter of adopting specific opinions and ‘certainties’ but the courage to enter the domain of mystery.”

The story of Abraham, the “father of faith” of Christians and Jews, is a good example. “He set out, not knowing where he was going.” For some who haven’t been able to commit to faith, this may seem absurd. But it’s often the case in human love as well. Aren’t most marriages of that kind? When we set out, we don’t really know where we’re going.

A Risky Endeavor

Says Halik of faith associated with love: “It is a risky endeavor whose outcome is never certain, a path on which we travel without knowing for sure where it will lead.”

This kind of love, and this kind of faith, rings true to many of us who at some moments are convinced of our faith and other moments not so sure. But we have this in common with many unbelievers, who undoubtedly aren’t always so sure of their unbelief. In one sense, we’re all believers and unbelievers at the same time.

The Christian and Jewish idea of love, and therefore of faith, challenges us to become more than we are, continuing the search for God, not always knowing where we are going.

Andrew Lenoir, a journalist and historian, writing in a recent issue of America Magazine about the famous mystic, Thomas Merton, says Merton “calls on us to sacrifice the world we have constructed for ourselves: our comfort zone, our complacency, our self-righteousness and our preferred facts. It might not be easy, but it is our small cross to bear if we would ask ourselves new questions and hear the voice of God in others here and now.”