We cannot apply our own “worthiness” to define those we need to love“A basic temptation: the flatly unchristian refusal to love those who we consider, for some reason or other, unworthy of love. And, on top of that, to consider others unworthy of love for even very trivial reasons. Not that we hate them, of course: but we just refuse to accept them in our hearts, to treat them without suspicion and deal with them without inner reservations. In a word, we reject those who do not please us. We are of course “charitable toward them.” An interesting use of the word:” charity” to cover and to justify a certain coldness, suspicion, and eve disdain. But this is punished by another inexorable refusal: we are bound by the logic of this defensive rejection to reject any form of happiness that even implies acceptance of those we have decided to reject. This certainly complicates life, and if one is sufficiently intolerant, it tends by making all happiness impossible.
“This means that we have to get along without constantly applying the yardstick of “worthiness” (who is worthy to be loved and who is not). And it almost means, by implication, that we cease to ask even indirect questions about who is “justified,” who is worthy of acceptance, who can be tolerated by the believer! What a preposterous idea that would be! And yet the world is full of “believers” who find themselves entirely surrounded by people they can hardly be expect to “tolerate,” such as Jews, Negroes, unbelievers, heretics, communists, pagans, fanatics and so on.
“God is asking of me, the unworthy, to forget my unworthiness and that of all my brothers, and dare to advance in the love which has redeemed and renewed us all in God’s likeness. And to laugh, after all, at all preposterous ideas of “worthiness.”(Conjectures , pp. 171-72.)
My Comments:
I
It is not easy to read Merton. It is, however, worth all our effort and much more.
In this selection on fraternal charity he has a special gift for us who so easily rationalize and trivialize our fundamental Christian task to share God’s love for all our brothers and sisters.
Merton goes into detail to itemize our programs of evasion and self-deceit in the name of charity. Teresa of Avila hits the central point in the third dwelling places of the Interior Castle. She points out our egoism goes underground. It surfaces doing wrong in the name of all that is good. Merton offers a truly concrete set of examples of how we do this. It is worthy of much prayer, reflection and self-examination on our part.
II
My favorite Eucharistic Prayer is the second for children. Early on it says “He came to show us how to love you Father by loving one another. He came to take away sin which keeps us from being friends, and hatred which makes us all unhappy.”
Later on, it offers this prayer: “Remember Father our families and friends and all those we do not love as we should.”
I love the second part that says, “All those we do not love as we should.” I have a list that is growing. It started out as long as my arm. As I am more faithful to prayer it continues to grow. Now it not only fills the length second are but it almost is finished with one leg and is ready for the other. I have a lot of people I “do not love as I should.”
Merton’s insights on fraternal charity invite all of us to more honest. We need a lot of work when it come to love for others.
Th human heart loves to divide and isolate others in various categories that justify our hostility or neglect. Jesus was very simple and direct: “Love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 15:12)
III
In another passage in Conjectures, p. 219, Merton makes a truly prophetic statement. He says, “From a purely human estimate, one would be tempted to think that at the rate we are going we can hardly avoid a major war between now (1962) and 1967.” (Vietnam war!)
Later in the passage he states something that is also relevant to this theme in ITEM-3 about fraternal charity.
“Whether or not a major war -a nuclear war- should finally break, we have to live in a way that daily takes this possibility seriously into account.
“This implies certain important choices, certain preferences.
“Even though one may not be able to halt the race toward death, one must nevertheless choose life, and the things that favor life. This means respect for every living thing, but especially for every man, made in the image of God. Respect for man even his blindness and his confusion, even when he may do evil. For we must see that the meaning of man has been totally changed by the Crucifixion: every man is Christ on the Cross, whether he realizes it or not . But we, if we are Christians, must learn to realize it. That is what it means to be a Christian, not simply one who believes certain reports about Christ, but one who lives in conscious confrontation with Christ in himself and in other men.
“This means, therefore, the choice to become empty of one’s self, the illusory self fabricated by our desires and fears, the self that is here now and will cease being here if this or that happens.”
Conjectures, p.219.
How we live makes a difference. When we choose life, and this choice is life from conception to the tomb, we are sowing the seeds of peace. All true peace is rooted in hearts that are open to God’s call to life. That call is first and foremost to choose God’s love that is without limits or conditions.
To do this we need a life of prayer that will open up the possibilities where selfishness has labeled others not worthy and not fitting. We need to look at the Cross. We should ask ourselves who does Jesus exclude as not worthy and not fitting for his sacrificial love.
We can only take on this challenge when we accept who we are in all of our brokenness and self-deception. The journey is one step at a time. We begin from where we are.
IV
Teresa was totally in accord with Merton on the importance of love for the sisters and brothers. For her charity was the final measure of the spiritual journey to God.
Charity is the proper open acceptance of others. As much as Teresa treasured prayer she was insistent that love for our brothers and sisters was the index our spiritual growth. For her the inner journey is validated and measured by the quality of our interpersonal relations. Teresa says, “We cannot know whether or not we love God, although there are strong indications for recognizing that we do love him; but we can know whether we love our neighbor.” (IC.V.2.8) This love is the essential condition for movement towards the center where God awaits.
Interpersonal relationships measure the authenticity of the inner journey. The search for God is always communal and not individualistic. Fraternal relations are the essential condition of growth. This love for the sisters and brothers is always being purified and transformed until one becomes one with God in the seventh dwelling places. Never was it truer that the grace is in the struggle.
Virtues Bring Order
Teresa understood that the obstacles to prayer were rooted in the disorder in our relation to God, to God’s creatures and to our sisters and brothers.
It is hard to pray when the heart is wallowing in self-pity because of some disrespect for our dignity. When we bring the distortions of our addictions, great and small, to prayer it is a painful task to center our heart on God. When our heart is consumed with animosity and anger, prayer happens with difficulty if at all.
Humility, detachment and charity bring a growing sense of order and peace. They produce an ambience open to the sacred. They nourish a freedom from all the divisions flowing from our fragmented heart. The virtues do not eliminate the problems in our life. They do, however, help us cope with them in a more serene and accepting way.
This is the heart of Teresa’s program. It is a call to live in a way that expresses the truth of humility, the freedom of detachment and the wonder of love for all. This produces peace that nourishes a deeper prayer which, in turn, generates a growth in acceptance of our reality in humility, detachment and love for all God’s children.
While inner peace is the goal, it is only achieved in spiritual warfare. The battle between prayer and life is relentless in its demands. The virtues are weak in the beginning but gradually grow with the help of prayer. Prayer seeks this growth to prop up its staying power in the battle against our own inner turmoil engrained in ambivalence. Meanwhile, we slowly gain a measure peace that helps us with the mayhem of life. The process of the mutuality of growth between the virtues and prayer continues for ever deepening levels of mutual support.
In all of it something special is happening. There is a new and free self that is evolving out of the dynamic. This personal transformation flows from a new relation of the self in humility, to our possessions in detachment and to others in love. This is our goal until God takes over in contemplation to finish the purification and personal transformation.
