Loving God for God’s Sake
O Lover,
Richard Rohr said this in a recent interview: “There’s an angel walking the streets of the world, and he’s got a torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other. And, of course, the people ask him, ‘What are you doing with the water and the torch?’ And he said, ‘I’m here to burn down the mansions of heaven and to put out the fires of hell. Only then can we see who really loves God.’”
That I find it impossible to exaggerate the importance of the central thrust of this image is the impetus for this post. In the arc of my life’s span I am continuing to move beyond both reward and fear in the journey into You. Whatever the case for this carrot/stick approach in my origins—never better than mixed, it became increasingly untenable in my adult life. Why has this become so for me?
First, there is the corrosive impact of the carrot/stick M.O. on us human seekers. This approach repeatedly burdens us with self-assessment as to accomplishment, worthiness/value, and identity. We find ourselves stalked by fear. Spirituality here is reduced to the contractual and negotiative, sisyphean striving and self-absorption. The notion of life being about keeping score of virtues reduces us to anxious and fearful barterers. And it is oxymoronic for terrestrial consumerism and acquisitiveness to be the template for its celestial prolongation. I have experienced reward/punishment as damning, as the antechamber to despair.
Second, and even more importantly, the carrot/stick approach is incompatible with who You, O Lover, have shown Yourself to be via the lens of Jesus the Christ. In being one of his followers I am called to embrace Your Self-disclosure—primary, definitive, and trustworthy, albeit not exhaustive—in his life, teachings, behavior, death and resurrection. How I hold the brokenness of both myself and humankind must be grounded in who You have shown Yourself to be. Whatever the elements of reward and punishment in earlier phases of Self-unveiling in Your cosmic drama, they pale before who the ever-unfolding and expanding Christ is showing You to be in the now. The god who elicits fear even while luring us with celestial goodies is inadequate at best, false at worst. For me this carrot/stick deity has long since become an obstacle to You.
Conversely, O Lover, what can be said about the experience of loving You for Your own sake rather than out of fear or reward? Most basically, rather than a juridical account, Your entanglement with us creatures as rendered concrete in the Christ is a passionate and luminous love story both wildly inclusive and laced throughout with intimations of the unitive. As we open ourselves to You as unconditional Love, ubiquitous Beauty, and unfailing trustworthiness we are bamboozled, discombobulated, inundated, reconstructed. To glimpse that we are cherished as irrevocably precious is to be pointed in the direction of loving You simply and solely for who You are. The words of the Common of Martyrs in the Prayer of the Hours—“God [Godself] is their reward”—pertain to all of us. Compared with the carrot/stick approach You, O Lover, seem too good to be true, and so You are.
The implications of this alternative model reshape everything. The gods of propitiation, expiation, substitutionary atonement, all fade in the face of who You are shown to be. The healing of the brokenness in humans and all other creatures is lodged entirely in who You are rather than our achievement, merit or mere chance. Your Ebullítio (“boiling over” [Eckhart]) story is sourced, sustained, and brought to full flower by You who are Love Itself. This, Your disposition ever and always, is nothing less than the far horizon of everything. Nothing remains yet to happen except for us creatures of of agency to receive Your extravagant and lavish largesse, the embrace in which You cherish and hold in sheer delight (a la Prov 8:31) all that You have wrought.
So then, if such lavishness is being shown in the Christ to characterize You, what remains for us humans? All of us are invited to embrace Your gift of Yourself, and reciprocate it with You and one another. Formerly frenzied scramblers, our aspiring is being enlarged to the singular: I want You, O Lover, Tu Sólus. Period.
