jr. September 5th, 2007
“[Your dream to become great] is the dream of every living creature, the desire that is the very root of life itself. To grow until every space is a part of you. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways of fulfilling this, however. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up until and destroy it until there is nothing left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, “Only I will be great, and to make room for me, all the rest of you must give up even what you already have to make room for me.” – Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
“7Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. … 19 We love because he first loved us.” – John the Elder (1 John 4)
What does it mean to say that God is Love? For much of our history, Christian theology has spoken of God’s central attribute as existence or glory or something of the like. But John is claiming something all-together different. John tells us that “God is love”, and another writing from that same community defines Love as Sacrifice: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). But what then does it mean to say that God is Sacrifice? To sacrifice is to give up that which we value. Giving up that which is not dear to us is hardly sacrifice; rather, to sacrifice is in a very real way to give of ourselves, to give that which comprises our identity. So imagine a God who is defined not by self-glorification or –gratification, but by self-emptying, self-sacrifice. Imagine a God existing in three persons who are engaged in an eternal dance of joyful, selfless giving. This sort of God finds glory not in self-aggrandizement, but rather in selfless giving. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the glory. It is this sort of God who, out of the overflow of joy and sacrifice, the overflow of Love, creates a world filled with being who, like himself, have a will that they can willfully sacrifice (for one cannot be selfless if one has no Self to give).
But here, of course, is the steep cost of Love. Beings created in the Imago Dei, the Image of God, can choose to sacrifice, or they can choose not to sacrifice. We can choose to give of ourselves or we can choose to preserve our Selves, to fight and to battle until we have created a space in which only We exist. This is the essence of Sin: that we would choose to preserve I at the expense of the Other, rather than to give I in service, in sacrifice to the Other. This tendency to think first of ourselves, to work for self-preservation, has been at work in us since the beginning, and we are nothing if not creatures of habit.
This Self, this Sin has infected us all since the beginning. We Self-full beings see the beauty of creation through the lens of Self; we tend to ask only “how can this serve my needs?” Rather than work with God to cultivate his Garden, we have chosen instead to do as we please, and in doing so, we serve to unmake that which God called good (Genesis 6). In choosing not to serve God even as God gives himself to us, we have become captives in our own minds, unable to see or care for anything beyond that which is good for I. We have lost what it means to abandon our Selves, to live for something other than I, and so have been cut off from God, unable to enter into his Garden of giving, of true Life anymore.
Thanks be to God that he did not leave us in this sorry state! Rather, he gave once more of himself, emptying himself of his divine nature and taking the form of a slave. He came to We who could tolerate no Other and he refused to be one with us. Rather, he offered us a different way to live, a way that did not demand the preservation of the Self, but rather offers the Self in acts of Love, of Sacrifice. We could not tolerate his Otherness, his difference, and yet still he gave himself to Us, and let us have our way with him. We did what any Self does when it feels threatened. We lashed out and destroyed that which threatens. He knew this, and yet he still gave. He gave and gave, until it killed him.
And only then was the power of Love revealed. For we were made to see that in the end, all of our attempts to preserve I will only end in destruction, for we were not created to take. We were created to give, in imitation of the Self who gave himSelf for us.
“A careless leper too comfortable in his own world to notice the older wounds have new infections with new intentions.
Darkness settled in behind me, tapped me on the shoulder singing shivers to my spine from the corners of my mind,
“I’ve been wanting to remind you of everything you’ve left behind and wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.”
She’s there when I’m alone and she always seems to know the stories that’ll take me back to where my comforts sleep.
A caress with velvet paws that hide her sharpened claws along the walls that time has built high searching for the blemishes.
And i know she’s breathing murder, that it is folly to endure her. But there is sweetness in her whisper,
“When you’ve had enough, I’ll be waiting. Wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.’”– Stavesacre, “The Two Heavens”
