you live what you love (or: isn’t this post a bit late for valentine’s?)…

Anton Szandor LaVey was the founder of the Church of Satan.  He said a lot of things.  And sometimes he stumbled onto some truth.  He once said, “You cannot love everyone; it is ridiculous to think you can. If you love everyone and everything you lose your natural powers of selection and wind up being a pretty poor judge of character and quality. If anything is used too freely it loses its true meaning.”  In a sense he was correct, and in a sense he was way off base.

When asked which of the laws were the most important, Jesus replied that the command to love God and love our neighbor are the two laws upon which all other laws are hung.  This is good news.  We are not bound by the crushing weight of the Law.  But it is also very bad news because Dr. LaVey was actually kind of right.  When we really get right down to it, we are utterly incapable of loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind as we are commanded.  And we are utterly incapable of loving our neighbor as ourselves.  That is where many of us skim over the words.  We see “Love God, love others” and then we sort-of mumble through that whole “with all your heart, soul, and mind” and “as yourself” part.  I can love my neighbor…but in the same way I love myself?

I don’t go so far as to claim that without God we cannot love.  I do say that without God we cannot love fully.  We can love deeply.  We can love passionately.  But we cannot love completely.  LaVey is following the logic of his worldview to its logical conclusion.  If there is no God, then we cannot hope to love everyone and everything.  Our only hope is to be remade.  We have to be emptied of the wrong types of love in order to be filled with the right kind.  This is what LaVey did not understand.  There is a key ingredient that LaVey missed.  He assumes that love is a limited resource.  He assumes that if I love someone who doesn’t deserve it, then I won’t have any left for those who do.  That is actually one of the key pieces of his philosophy.  He believes in “kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates.”

But he’s wrong.

Love is not a limited resource.

If I love God…

and my wife…

and my son…

and my dogs…

and my cat…

and my guitar…

and my family…

and my career…

Guess what.  I have plenty of love left to give.

I can still love homemade pizza…

and “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed…

and snow…

and spring…

and long walks in the woods in the rain…

The problem is not that I have so many units of love to give, and if I give a certain amount of it to one thing then there is none left for the rest.  The problem is confusing the types of love.  If I love my career in the way that I should love my wife it is a problem.  If I love long walks in the woods in the rain disproportionately to the way I love my son, there is a problem.  If I love anything in the way that I should love God, then there is a problem.  The problem is not supply of love, the problem is priority, proportion, and source.

As we said above, if I try to love things out of order, things get screwy.  If I try to love myself more than my neighbor, things go a bit haywire.  If I confuse “love” with “like” and try to force myself to feel amicably for everything and everyone around me (and worse, if I try to do it on my own steam), then things fall apart quickly.  I don’t know if he ever realized it, but what LaVey was revolting against in these statements was actually a corruption of the Truth about Love.  The smartest guy I know always says, “If the devil can’t get you to do something wrong, he’ll get you to do something right in the wrong way.”  If we can’t be persuaded into a miserable hatred of the world around us, then we can pretty easily be manipulated into a washed-out and ineffectual love that leads to resentment.  Or we can be persuaded that we just don’t have enough love to spare for everyone.

This is the source of the problem for both the legalist and the relativist.  The legalist says, “I’ve earned love, and you should too.”  The legalist says, “I won’t help that group of people because they don’t appreciate it.”  The legalist says, “God helps those who help themselves.”  The relativist says, “Everything deserves the same love.”  He says we should love the tree, and the dog, and the child, and the mother not only equally, but in the same degree and priority.  Ultimately, according to the relativist, we should love everything.  We should love light and dark, love and hate, mercy and cruelty.  Many relativists won’t go this far, but if you follow the logic of the position, this is where you end.  Otherwise there is some sort of blind leap of faith that says that mercy is better than cruelty.  Of course I encourage making that leap of faith.  But it’s important to then trace your steps backwards logically and see that the source of that idea is not where you started from.

So our problem is that both views of love lead to resentment.  If you have to earn it, then no one will measure up.  And the few who do for a while will ultimately let you down.  If it’s the washed out sort of love that applies in the same way to everything, then you yourself won’t measure up.  You will ultimately find yourself valuing one thing over another, and you will always fail to love everything in the same way.

And there is the crux of the issue.  We are always, always, always going to value one thing more than another.  This is because we live in a world of thesis and antithesis.  We live in a world in which A is A, and A is not non-A.  We do not love everything. 

In fact often to love one thing means to hate its opposite. 

If I love mercy, then I hate injustice.  If I love good, then I hate evil.  If I love kindness then I hate cruelty.  But it goes beyond that.  Dave Desforge says that Love is expulsive.  Love pushes out other types of love.  If I love my wife, then that love will push out my love for things that interfere with our relationship.  If I love my work then it pushes out my love for being lazy.  This is why priority is so integral to the equation.  When our love gets out of whack we get into trouble.  Because the inverse of these things is true as well.  If I love things that get in the way of my relationship with my wife, then it pushes out some of my love for her.  If I love being lazy, then it pushes out some of my love for my work.  And even love for good things can do this.  I could love a career in which I help those around me, but if I love it more than I love my family, then I do damage.

So ultimately we have to have a gauge.  There has to be something to take ultimate priority, and be the measure by which other loves fall into place.  That love is for God.  When we begin to love God with all of our heart, strength, and mind–a feat only possible through the work of the Spirit–then other loves will begin to fall into place.  And when we can love our neighbor as ourselves–again, only possible through the Spirit–then these priorities begin to click into each other like gears on a clock.

It is simple to say that we love all the right things.  But the root will make the fruit.  If I say I love my neighbor as myself, but I refuse to help the one in need, then I don’t really love them like I say I do.  If I say I love my family, but I spend all my time in the woods alone, then maybe I love being in the woods alone more than my family.

You live what you love.

But it’s a process.  Look at what you resent, there’s a clue to what you love.  If you resent your family because they keep you from playing basketball, you love basketball more than your family.  If you resent your work because it keeps you away from your family, then you love your family.  It takes an honest look in the mirror, and an honest surrender to the process of being changed.

If you want to be loving, get in touch with the One who is Love.

the gospel of Gordon Ramsay (re-posted)…

In celebration of the return of my favorite show, Kitchen Nightmares, I’ve decided to re-post an entry from a year or so ago.  I hope you enjoy it…

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Chef Gordon Ramsay, if you don’t already know him, is a foul mouthed, temperamental, highly strung television chef.  He is also one of the greatest examples I’ve seen to date of the way the Gospel operates.  If you are of a mind to, you can see the show Kitchen Nightmares here (be warned, you will hear lots of bleeping, and a lot of the words that are pretty rough, but no longer bleeped on television.  If that offends you, don’t click the link).  The episode that made this Gospel parallel clear to me was called “Revisited: Gordon Returns.”  It recaps six restaurants he visited, and shows them a year later.  Watching them all in a row like that really drove home the way Chef Ramsay does his thing.

Basically, the premise of the show is that some restaurant is failing for whatever reason.  Enter Gordon Ramsay.  He comes in, eats whatever they serve him as their specialty, and then proceeds to verbally abuse them at every turn.  He slams the food, he goes into the kitchen and shows them every piece of dirt, filth, lazy short cuts, and non-chefliness (is that a word?  No, worries, we’ll make it a word.) that they might have.  He pushes until he hits the wall.  And the thing is, that wall is always there.  Always.  He has said on several occasions, “Are you angry?  Good, now maybe you can learn something.”

Chef Ramsay understands something that we would do well to understand as well.  When we realize that we are failing, that things are not going the way we want them to, our first course of action is to make excuses.  Like the people on his show with their failing restaurants, we blame others, we blame circumstances, we blame anyone and anything but ourselves.  So many of us keep trying, more and more emphatically, to do the same things we’ve been doing all along.  One restaurant Chef Ramsay visited had a stock pile of absurd signs and posters of specials and give-aways.  Basically doing the same thing, over and over again, even though it was obviously not working.  “Maybe half off soup and sandwich will work since free appetizer with two dinners didn’t.”  It reminds me of an analogy I heard Tony Jones give.  He compared a person to a lawn mower that is running out of gas.  Right before you run out of gas in your lawn mower, the engine revs up to a high pitch, and runs hotter and faster than normal just before it sputters out.  This is a good picture of that “anger wall” that blows up just before we sputter out and become ready to be refueled.

(On a side note…Tony Jones is the director of Emergent Village.  There are a lot of good things and a lot of not-so-good things coming from the Emergent “conversation.”  Click *here* for the interview Tony Jones did on Steve Brown Etc. which is where the above analogy came from.)

Lao Tzu says, “If you continue in the same direction, you might just end up where you are going.”  My dad says it even better, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”  As long as we keep making excuses for ourselves, we are going to continue down the same path.  Chef Ramsay understands that this excuse making is an obstacle to growth.  He also understands that when he hits that anger, resentment, and fear, that he is at the breaking point.  He realizes that he just held up a mirror, chased them around the room with it, beat them over the head with it, and just past the anger point, he has them huddled in the fetal position in the corner, crying uncontrollably, but looking for the first time in that mirror without any masks or pretense.  This is where growth and change happen.  New gardens grow in the dead matter of the old garden.

In Luke 18, the Bible has this to say:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

There is something underlying this story.  The tax collector stood at a distance.  He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast.  This is just my theory, but I think that tax collector probably spent a long time thinking along the same lines as the Pharisee.  The business of tax collecting in that day was usually a pretty dishonest one.  In order to make your living doing something you know is wrong, you have to have a pretty special ability to delude yourself into thinking somehow you are right to do wrong.  But something happened in this man’s life that made it unavoidable for him.  He had to face the ugliness of his own sin.  Something or someone came along that made him understand just how dark and small his heart really was.  That something/someone was ultimately the Holy Spirit working through people and circumstances in his life to show him the reality of his darkness.

Gordon Ramsay is, in many respects, a great example of the way the Spirit works in our lives.  He holds up a mirror.  We glance, and turn away, and superimpose the image we like to see of ourselves in place of the one that is real.  Then the Spirit says, “Your best effort is horrible.  Your food is inedible, your kitchen is filthy, your dry storage is infested with roaches, you are a horrible excuse for a chef.”  And we get angry.  “How dare you come in here and tell me something like that!”  The Spirit says, “Oh really?  So, what you’re doing is working then?  You’re a blinding success?  Then why are you looking for help?”  And eventually we are left with the choice.  We can take a good honest look at the filth in our kitchen.  We can take a good honest look at the pre-packaged, frozen, bought-in junk we are trying to pass off as gourmet righteousness.  Or, we can continue in our delusion, and end up a failure, sunken under our delusions of right-ness.

On Kitchen Nightmares, the people who change, and stick with it, are invariably successful.  The ones who do not, invariably fail.  One striking similarity I see in all the people who opt not to change (and really, in the initial resistance that everyone shows) is their fear that Chef Ramsay is trying to change their “self-ness” that they have put into their restaurant.  Each and every time the fear goes something like this, “I have built this on my dream.  There is so much of me in this.  I worked so hard on this.  I don’t want someone coming in here and changing what I have planned for this place.”  This is so much like our resistance to change into what the Spirit has for us.  We are so afraid that we will be turned into something different that we truly are.  Like we’ll be turned into one of the pod-people from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.  But in our lives, as in Kitchen Nightmares, if we listen to the suggestions and changes that are being offered, they will always be something that is in keeping with who we are right now.  Chef Ramsay doesn’t ask a vegetarian restaurant to become a steak house.  He doesn’t try to turn and Indian restaurant into an Irish Pub.  He shows a place what they are truly good at and will enjoy, not what they think they want to be good at and enjoy.  The Spirit is the same.  We are shown what we are good at, we are shown the skills that God has given us.

When we hit that wall, break through, and see ourselves as we truly are, we learn two things.  Those two things are, as my friend Scott Stewart says, “The bad news of the Gospel, and the Good news of the Gospel.”  The bad news is that we are far worse than we can see.  The good news is that we are more loved than we could ever imagine.  The great news is that in the good news of the Gospel, we are loved and given talents, and affinities that, if we listen to the Spirit and use them according to the plan, will give us more of a true “self” than anything we could do in the horrible “freedom” that we demand when we want to be “ourselves” without God.

I pray, for myself as much as anyone, that we can take a look at the brutal, cold facts of our filthy-rag righteousness.  And that from that honest knowledge, that we can begin to grow and change.  I pray that we can let go of these ideas of our “self” that we hold so closely, and embrace the Truth of who we really are.

C.S. Lewis says in just a  few sentences more than I’ve said in this nearly 1500 word article:

“We are to be re-made. All the rabbit in us is to disappear—the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, an ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.” – C.S. Lewis

Formal…but here to party…

Have you ever seen the episode of the Andy Griffith Show where Andy tries to turn Ernest T. Bass into a gentleman?  Really any of those “Pygmalion” or “My Fair Lady” type things will work.  But Andy Griffith is the best.  Take a look at a clip from the episode.  Go ahead…I’ll wait…

…Did you notice how Ernest looked in his suit?  He was stifled.  He was robotic.  Sure, if you had never seen him before you might not know what was wrong.  But five minutes with him and you’d realize that something wasn’t quite right.  There’s a wildness in his eyes.  There’s just something about him that screams, “I’m a wild person crammed into a suit.”  His behavior is changed, and his appearance is changed.  He is playing nice, but it only lasts so long before it begins to unravel.  Like they say, you can take the man out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the man.

Now, have you ever sat in a church service and wondered just what was so special about this “God” guy?  I mean, he seems respectable enough, but isn’t there something a bit odd about him?  He seems stifled.  He seems a bit robotic.  He seems a bit like a wild man who’s been stuffed into a suit.

Now, have you ever been to the ocean?

Have you ever seen a waterfall after a heavy rain?

Have you ever seen hundred-year-old trees snapped in half by the wind?

Have you ever seen acid-green moss shake a defiant fist in the air through decaying leaves and ice, screaming, “I am alive!  Life always wins!”?

Maybe the reason we grow disillusioned with church is that we make it too polite.  Now I don’t want to overstate this.  Just like with Ernest T. Bass, there are times when it is important to put on the suit and play nice.  And God does this well.  He meets us where we are, and for many of us, where we are is in a polite church service.  But I also don’t want to understate this.  We need a God that is real.  We need to be people who are real.  Jesus didn’t die to make us nice.  He died so that we can fully love.

Many of us are crying out that the Church has lost its power.  It has lost its strength and its influence.  It has lost its connection with our real lives.  It has lost its connection with Spirit.  What has replaced it has been political action groups, hateful televangelists, and stinking lying liars who vomit out the so-called “prosperity gospel.”  Many non-Christians look at the Church and say things like, “I like Jesus, but I don’t want anything to do with what you guys are doing.”  It seems fake.  It seems stifled.  It seems robotic.  It seems a bit like we’ve taken Jesus’ message and stuffed it into a container that doesn’t really work.

Maybe what we need is to let our God loosen his tie a bit.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love the Church.  What I don’t love is the way the Church has been corrupted.  I don’t say we should throw out Church.  We are called into relationship with God, but in the same breath we are called into relationship with each other.  That is what Church is about.  Francis Schaeffer says this,

“Therefore Christians in their relationships should be the most human people you will ever see.  This speaks for God in an age of inhumanity and impersonality and facelessness.  When people look at us their reaction should be, “These are human people”…If they cannot look upon us and say, “These are real people,” nothing else is enough.  Far too often young people become Christians and then search among the Church’s ranks for real people, and have a hard task finding them.”

So what does it mean to be “real”?  From the Christian perspective we have to look at what Jesus said.  And what Jesus said is telling.  The last thing he said to the apostles before ascending into heaven is a powerful clue as to what he thought it meant to be a fully realized human.  He said, “By this will all men know that you are mine, and that I was sent by the Father; if you have love for one another.” And likewise, when he was asked the most important law for humans to follow he summed it all up with “Love God, and love each other.”

Some of us see God as angry, powerful, and distant.  Some see him as an ooey gooey spirit that hasn’t got a personality, and is there when I want to be thankful, but doesn’t care when I want to be a bit shady.  Some see Jesus as a “warrior with a sword in hand and a tattoo down his leg.”  I tend to see Jesus as a subversive hippie prophet, teaching Love and “smash the state.”

Some like to think of Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt.  A Jesus that says, “I’m formal, but I’m here to party.”

But maybe if we’re missing God in our real life, it’s because we’re looking for the wrong things.  Maybe we miss God because he’s got dirt under his nails.  Maybe we miss him because he’s sitting down and hugging the neck of someone we find repulsive.

Do I miss part of God because he’s sitting down with a conservative business man in a freshly pressed suit?

Do some miss part of God because he’s whispering their name from a moss covered tree in the middle of the woods?

Maybe if we miss him, we miss him because we keep reaching up trying to grasp someone who has come down here among us.  You find what you look for.  Seek and keep seeking and you will find.  But I guarantee you that what you find will surprise you.