We’re free to fight after we fall in love

“The first step toward love is a common sharing of mutual worth and value.”

Howard Thurman

We can talk about the issues if you want to. What’s on your mind? Abortion, immigration, death penalty, nuclear non-proliferation? We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Before we dive in, consider this: Issues come and go. Like a train passing through town, the issues of the day are here for a little while, then they go away leaving us behind. So if we get all sideways with each other over whatever issue we disagree on, when its relevance passes, the anger that erupted between us as we argued about the issues will likely be left behind. The issue is gone but we’re left standing in pools of frustration, suspicion, and discontent, mad at each other and wounded by the words we hurled at one another in our argument. I suggest this: Let’s argue after we fall in love, deeply in love, having glimpsed that which we share as a common source of life and worth, the divine Spark of the living God that dwells within us both and animates all creation to fullness of life.

“The religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central. 

This is no ordinary achievement."

Howard Thurman

What really interests me is digging into the love ethic that lies underneath and informs our engagement with the issues. This love ethic was given to us by Jesus and is the foundation from which all our decisions, opinions, and actions should emerge.

When Howard Thurman was a little boy he got in a fight with a bully and he won. Howard was right and the bully was wrong. By all accounts the bully got what was coming to him. Howard was David to the bully’s Goliath. Howard was totally justified in his use of violence to defeat the bully. Yet, when his grandmother heard about it she said, “Howard, no one wins a fight.”

She was not speaking to the issue of Howard being bullied. She was speaking into the depth of what drives Howard to live and move and have his being in this life. She was pointing him to the non-violent love ethic of Jesus which is the foundation of all his words and actions. That line - no one wins a fight - was planted in Howard like a seed that germinated in his mind and heart for decades. Something like forty years later in his magnificent book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard wrote that the only thing we should attack in our enemy is their status as our enemy.

That conclusion is the fruit that is born after years spent looking for and surrendering to the love-ethic that grounds our being and can inform our engagement with the world instead of fighting about the particulars of any given issue.

We can talk about the issues, and at Good Shepherd we do just that in small groups all week long, but the important work to be done first is the discovery of the love of God that lives within us as our source and our guide. Become intimately aware of and driven by that love and you’ll become infinitely useful to God whose great desire is that we love his people no matter their issues.

Don’t fight until you fall in love, then fight all you want.

I am a broken record on the subject of love. I blame it on my teachers one of whom, Etty Hillesum, puts it this way: 

“All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor. Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live. And I believe that I will never be able to hate any human being for his so-called wickedness, that I shall only hate the evil that is within me, though hate is perhaps putting it too strongly even then. In any case, we cannot be lax enough in what we demand of others and strict enough in what we demand of ourselves.”

Did you catch that last line? Mercy. Read it again. Do you remember who her captors were? The Nazis. Oh what love, what love propelled and carried Etty through her life!