“For Your Love Is Better Than Life”

O Lover,

Across recent decades I have both begun and concluded the day with the praying of Psalm 63:1-8. Recently, just before Mass actually, I was skewered by the line “For Your love is better than life” (vs 3). This post is a brief exploration, one ever in Your presence, of those words.

The linchpin is the Hebrew chésed, a term with a field of meaning deep, expansive and strong. Thus it is variously, albeit never quite adequately, translated as  “lovingkindness,” “steadfast love,” “favor,” or “compassion.” The Greek Septuagint (LXX) translates chésed as éleos (“mercy”), Jerome’s Latin Vulgate as misericórdia (“compassion of heart”). In the newer testament’s Greek the closest equivalent to chésed is agápe generally translated as (Your) “love.”

My intellect is boggled, my affections seized, by both the thrust and scale of the Psalter’s declaration. According to Maslow’s hierarchy, the foundational human needs are physiological and having to do with safety/security, both involving the urgency of survival itself. Response to such undergirding needs finds varied expression: e.g., fixation on militarism and policing; allowance of inequity of goods and privilege; marginalization of others perceived as different. In short, the sundry faces of survivalism, both individual and tribal.

Fascinating, albeit neglected, are two additional extrapolations of “survivalism” oxymoronically extended out into the “Greater Life.” The more familiar example involves the tension between salvation and condemnation beyond physical death, and has seen many people motivated in the present by the desired end result in a future beyond time. Not surprisingly, language about such “salvation” among western Christians is overwhelmingly individualistic. A less familiar “survivalist” expression into the Greater Life involves the preservation of the egoic gestalt. This tendency, also predominant in western religiosity, insists upon the retention of the separate identity of the self beyond death. In contrast to unítas indistinctiónis (“dissolving union,” “oneism”), a dynamic first blossoming in the 13th C, this impulse cleaves to unítas distinctiónis (“union of entities”). Thus two expressions of the compulsion to project the human need to survive out beyond physical death.

For me all of the above expressions of the need to control outcome and survive, whether pre- or post-death, are countered by the splendor of Your chésed (Ps 63:3), Your agápe (I Jn 4:8,16). Your lovingkindness, O Lover, is surely better than the survival of any and all dimensions of my life itself. In my more wakeful moments I long to remove the asterisks, the conditioning caveats, the qualifying notations, in favor of the drawing up of my entire existence into a no-holds-barred reciprocation of Your embrace whatever all that might, or might not, entail. I thirst for Your cosmic salvation more than for my tailored variety, for immersion in You more than for an intact egoic identity, for the consummative flowering of Your nearly fourteen billion year transformative liébeslied (“lovesong”) than for anything centering in my fabricated ego. 

My sole request is to be drawn into You, the Whole who is Reality Itself, O Lover. I long for You . . . however! Again: however!