ADDING TO LOVE [W, 3-6-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—ADDING TO LOVE [W, 3-6-24]

 

I am re-reading Rachel Naomi Remen. Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings. Stories from her life, about how she changed from a human doing to a human being, changed from a medical doctor to a human doctor.

She grew in three stages. She went from scientist to oncologist to psychologist. She doesn’t tell it that way, doesn’t use the taxonomy of three stages, but that is what I see in her story. As she went from one stage to another, she did not abandon what she had learned before. When she became wholistic, she didn’t give up using her skills as a surgeon, but she added on. She did not grow out of any stage. She added onto each stage.

That’s the key to aging, I think—not discarding, or outgrowing, but adding on.

That seems to me to be the way we all age, in three stages. We add each stage to the one before it. Of course, they are not the same for everyone.

I would describe my own add-on stages as going from a human doing, to a human being [cancer], to a human waiting. Or maybe, doing the Word, hearing the Word, listening for the Word. [Yes, hearing and listening are different.]

In my human doing stage, I said often that love is a verb. Love is doing.

Cancer brought on my human being stage. I couldn’t do love nearly as much, so I was able to be in love. Love was sharing.

Now I’m waiting and watching, to see how love will be. Love is.

Physical life is designed so that energy come first and wisdom comes last. That is especially true of brain development. We are built for: fire, ready, aim. It doesn’t make sense, but that is the way it is.

Throughout these stages, two different emotions are at war within us. They are original sin and what John Wesley called prevenient [preventing] grace. Original sin is represented by first man, Adam, who tried to outdo God by eating from the tree of knowledge. Preventing grace, that saves us even in the midst of our original sin, is represented in the new man, Jesus Christ.

[Original sin is not very original at all in the way we use that word currently. It’s just the same old boring sin everyone has always had. “Original” means that it was present at and in the origin of humanity, and in and at the origin of each of us, origin-al.]

Original sin is love gone wrong. Prevenient grace is love gone right.

My three stages of understanding and living love have gone like this: Love is a verb. Love is a noun. Love is a hope.

I did not give up the doing of love when I started into the being of love. And I gave up neither the doing or the being when I started the hoping. Love has simply become fuller with each new stage.

Okay, three stages is arbitrary. The main point about growing in love is this: don’t give up any of love as we go along-- how we do love, how we are love, how we hope love--but to add onto it.

John Robert McFarland

I’m thinking about love today because it’s the birthday of the woman who has taught me all about it.