Beyond Transaction (11/25/25)
O Lover,
In an era of metastasizing capitalism it is not surprising that commodification is widespread. Whether in the arts and culture, data and knowledge, or values and morality, efforts are expended to monetize everything and reap commercial benefit in the marketplace. As nearly everything is assigned a numerical value allowing it to be exchanged with other such assignments, life becomes increasingly transactional and characterized by quid pro quo (“something for something”). In this society of economic reductionism our phraseology is telling: “there is no such thing as a free lunch”; “you get what you deserve”; “we are a meritocracy” (the unevenness of the pitch notwithstanding); “resource disproportionality is the inevitable outcome of a variety of aptitudes plus failure to reverence the marketplace.” Those best gaming the system to personal advantage, capitalism’s achilles heel, are pedestaled as our exemplary heroes. And “privilege” (a good word) is something that is deserved.
Given its pervasiveness it is not surprising that this monetization of life deeply impacts religiosity. Capitalism is widely viewed as at least vaguely rooted in Scripture; moral virtue is widely understood as compliance within a transaction structure and on cherry-picked issues; a successful “prosperity gospel” evangelist is presumed to be wealthy.
More importantly, perception of, and language about, You among many of us Christians is couched in transactional paradigms: e.g., Your anger requires assuagement and the meeting of Your justice demands; a sacrificial victim is necessary; sufficient merit must somehow be accumulated; etc. Many of us have been nearly broken on the quid pro quo wheel of punitive notions of You with transactional depictions of Your essential disposition deadly for some. Many such distortions of You have in the end driven us from You, whether via despair or comfort.
In contrast to the above, O Lover, the unfolding minority report in the Christian tradition, its mystical edge prominent, sings of You as unconditional Love Itself, as grace or unmerited favor. Particularly the apophatics write of You as the Grunt (“Ground”), the Abyss, the Depth, the Source and Télos of all that is. This movement away from the transactional has given rise to a rich plethora of very different depictions of You. For example, Julian showed me that there is no anger in You; Juan that You are the “Living Flame of Love”; Catherine of Siena that You are the enveloping Ocean in which I swim; Thomas Keating that You are the flowing River in which I abide. Permeating all of these images (or “un-images”) is the givenness of Your unencompassability, Your relentlessness and irrepressibleness in the pursuit, the incomprehensibility of Your “Love That Will not Let [Us] Go,” in the words of the hymn.
It is understandable that many would view this liberation from transactional salvation as too good to be true, for that it is. And that is precisely the point: You Yourself are the gift all out of proportion to our transactions, our negotiations (a la the homebound son [Lk 15:17-19]), our self-assessments of merit, our self-interested fabrications of who You are. Rather than deal-making, negotiation, and the juridical life, You are Your Love, tsunamic and inundating, for which we have hungered and thirsted since forever. Mesmerized, we are stunned and amazed into Your embrace which is where we have always been and ever shall be. Your sign is vastly more “embrace” than “abacus.” And this embrace, in contrast to a monetized and transactional caricature of Your lavish Ebullítio (“overflow”), is Reality Itself.
In a world so often dominated by the transactional “deal,” what is our human role? Only a “yes” with all who we are to Your transformative Presence at the core of our being where, in the words of Eckhart, there has always been an “uncreated something.” O Lover—and does not the very use of that term elicit within me a thoracic jolt?—O Lover, in Your unconditional Love there is no transaction: as we hear from Thérèse of Lisieux via the writer Georges Bernanos, “all is grace.”
