Love, Actually

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”

-Matthew 25:41-45


“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

-1 Corinthians 13:8-13


I remember the year I was in sixth grade, coming to school the day after Bill Clinton was elected. I remember sitting on the steps to the portable classroom behind the swing set, hugging my knees to my chest, watching as my teacher approached, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“She’s crying,” someone next to me whispered.

Someone else said, “Are you okay?”

And she answered, simply – and I’ll never forget this – “We won.”

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I’d been raised in a staunchly conservative home in a staunchly conservative part of the state, and the election the night before had cast a pall of gloom over our entire house that had persisted through the night. It hadn’t even really occurred to me, I don’t think, that there were actually people out there who had voted for a Democratic candidate. Not just now, but ever. These were theoretical agents of evil that existed, in my mind, somewhere in the realm of the monsters under my bed. Frightening, yes, and absolutely life-threatening, but invisible nonetheless. Now one of these aliens was standing before me, disguised as what had only the day before been an icon of knowledge and authority, and not only was she tangible, she was crying for joy. I was absolutely baffled.

Fast forward to 2008.

In 2008, I developed a severe health problem that drained me as much financially as it did emotionally; even with two separate insurance plans, I’m so deeply in debt that at one point I actually considered dropping out of graduate school. In 2008, the price of food in the United States became so high that for the first time I had to choose between fresh vegetables and paying my electricity bill, the price of gasoline was so high that my law student boyfriend could barely afford to commute the five miles each way to school in his beat-up Honda, and it was impossible to walk down any residential street in Seattle without seeing at least one real estate sign every two or three blocks. In 2008, even my friends who had good jobs engineering for Boeing or programming for Microsoft went to work every day fearing that it might be for the last time. In 2008, schools failed, factories failed, hearts failed. And we live in one of the more economically secure parts of the country.

In 2008, the US unemployment rate rose to almost 6%. This does not count the heads of families of four or five who were reduced to working at Burger King for minimum wage to make ends meet.

In 2008, the number of my brothers and sisters killed in a pointless, political war grew to total over 4,000.

In 2008, the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the US invasion grew to total over one million. Which would matter, if anyone cared.

If a non-American child is hit by a stray bullet, does he still make a sound?

And still we bicker. We draw our proverbial lines in the sand and stand obstinately behind them, our ignorance and insecurity proving such threats to our egos that we are rendered utterly incapacitated. The food is at our sides, the hungry at our feet, but in the blind confinement of our need to be right we find ourselves unable to move in order to feed them. All good intentions are lost in our stubbornness. All potential for compassion is consumed by the void of our refusal to open our eyes for fear of what we might see. Before us, people are denied educations, denied rights, denied freedom, denied the very things the fight for which swells our chests with pride and patriotism when we call ourselves Americans. People are, quite literally, dying in front of our eyes. We could save them, but we won’t. Our drive to love others is nowhere near as strong as our fear of change.

So much of the status quo is built around the Christian “right”. (The potential ironically self-satisfied double-meaning of which phrase does not, incidentally, go unnoticed by this writer). But very often I wonder, should Jesus actually see fit to return to earth on a cloud of glory tomorrow morning, if he wouldn’t be just slightly startled by our current state of affairs. Try as I might, I can find nothing in the direct teachings of Jesus having to do with gay marriage or abortion. These petty, ambiguous issues we might be justified in arguing over only if every other evil in the world were already banished. These things we use to distract ourselves so we don’t have to think about the poor and the hungry and the sick, because doing so might require us to make more than the superficial sacrifice of a once-a-week visit to the guilt-assuaging congregation down the street.

What I do find, however, are almost nonstop admonitions to practice love and compassion. There are no caveats on the mandate that we turn the other cheek; this was not worded as merely a suggestion, nor is it a verse easily taken out of context for the benefit of pacifist rhetoric. We are not asked to turn our cheeks except when we are afraid, or when we are threatened, or when we think a potential enemy might be harboring nuclear weapons. We are asked instead to stand up for our beliefs by example, through love and through peace. Not the korny, acid-trip kind, but the love and peace borne of a true compassion for our fellow man, the practice of which is the only thing preventing us from becoming the very thing we stand against.

Jesus was a revolutionary. He spent his life fighting the status quo, the blind, frightened self-interest of a religious system, one with so many soap boxes beneath its feet that it had risen to an elevation from which the suffering of the humanity below it looked like the suffering of ants viewed from an airplane. Jesus dined with prostitutes and thieves. He touched lepers with neither fear nor loathing. He preached self-examination before judgment of others. Yet we studiously ignore these attributes of the man we simultaneously hold up as our ultimate ideal, because to acknowledge them would be an uncomfortable challenge to our own self-righteousness.

“My people,” I can picture him saying, “My precious people that I created with my own two hands, my precious people for whom I sacrificed my life, are paving the streets with their blood. They are sick and they are hungry, but you can’t be bothered to turn off your televisions. And you who I’ve blessed with everything I could possibly bestow on a human being, fully expecting you to extend this generosity to your fellow men in kind! You idiots are fighting over this?”

We have turned his Father’s house into a den of thieves.

We have a chance, now, to be better. Will we take it? Will we set aside the utopian ideals in which everyone sees things our way – six million utopias for six million people – even just for a moment, and look into the eyes of our sick and our poor and our hungry, not with fear, but with a resolve buoyed by a compassion free from conditions or judgments or prejudice? Are we brave enough to love our brothers? Such a love will require the courage to stand alone in the face of doubt, in the face of ridicule, in the face of a world in which compassion is a subversive and threatening concept. Are we ready?

Tonight, my life comes full circle. I understand why my teacher was crying all those years ago, because I find myself weeping. Shedding tears in the midst of daring to hope, because –maybe naively - I believe that we can be strong again. That we can once again find our capacity for compassion in the midst of a world of hatred. I believe that we can overcome the fear that tethers us and extend our hands, weak and atrophied though they may be, to those in need around us. That if we can admit our weaknesses, we can be strong in one another. That united we stand, divided we find ourselves in the midst of a hell we have created through our own blindness. And I believe we’re better than that.