Love is How We Open to Life (Principles and Practices for the Spiritual Life, Part 1d)
There are two general postures toward life: open or closed. The former is characterized by the risk, passion, wonder and joy of giving one’s self in a whole and undivided way. We reach beyond the encroachment of our self-contained shell by engaging with the people and experiences of life. In these experiences, we necessarily give up control and allow our lives to be affected and changed by what befalls us. In this way, we entrust what is most precious, indeed our very selves, to others. This openness leaves us indescribably vulnerable. Such is why alongside the experience of life’s highest joys, the open heart bears life’s most poignant sorrows.
The closed posture programmatically restricts the experiences of life. By refusing the loss of control entailed in authentic engagement with life, by objectifying reality in order to maintain a sense of control, by denying the opportunity for the people and experiences of life to really change one’s self, the self remains as desired – unchanged, untouched, unmoved. In the avoidance of true self-giving, the sorrows as well as the joys of life are quenched. Vulnerability being absent, passion also lies dormant. Under the ruse of passion, risks are well calculated and attempted primarily where there is really nothing to lose – carefully concealing the underlying apathy.
Love is how we open to life. The passion for life and for living lies in the giving of ourselves in bold and risky ways, in laying down our lives for one another. When we love, we open ourselves to be shaped and changed by others because we, in a sense, invest our existence in others. We offer ourselves as a gift — a gift that can never be returned — and placing it in the hands of another, give them power of determination over us for good or ill.
Jesus summarizes the entirety of God’s guidance for life (i.e., the “torah” or “law”) as the call to love with the entirety of our being. He said he came to give us life and life to the full (John 10:10). His command can be summed up as “love one another, just as I have loved you” (John 15:12), which for him means to “offer the core of our very being to those we love” (John 15:13). This full and unreserved self-giving is ironically the means by which we remain in the love of Jesus and experience the fullness of his joy (John 15:11).
The evasion of such counsel necessarily entails that our lives will be characterized by a marked emotional numbness, or else an artifice of passion contrived to veil our apathy and fears. Yet the call to love is the opportunity to abandon our apathy and begin to experience the full, rich and vibrant life of passion we were created for. Jurgen Moltmann describes it well when he says, “Apparently human beings cannot find themselves in themselves, or hold fast to what they are in themselves, without self-division or self-dissolution. It sounds paradoxical, but it is none the less true to say that it is only the person who goes out of himself who comes to himself. It is only in other people that we find the way to ourselves. No one can ever say ‘I am who I am,’ for no one is God. We say ‘I am because you are; you are because I am.’ (Jurgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 24-25)
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