By Roland Ashby
One of Christianity’s most radical demands is that we are not merely to tolerate those we find difficult, but actually love them. No wonder the Catholic writer and philosopher GK Chesterton observed: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
By “those we find difficult” I’m thinking in this instance of those we find difficult at work, in our families, in our social networks and in our neighbourhood. Their worldviews, their belief systems, their modus operandi may be so different from ours that tolerance is the best we can hope for. But love? Never!
Laurence Freeman, Benedictine monk and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation offers us some profound insights into this dilemma. We have to learn to withdraw our “projections” from others if we are to love them, he says. Loving others, “like loving ourselves, is about letting the other be who they are.”
The only way to deal with human relationships, which are so complex, is, he says, through “the simplicity of love; in love where we do not judge, where we do not compete, but where we accept, where we revere, and where we learn compassion. And so, in learning to love others, we release the inner joy of being, the joy of being that radiates outwards through us... touching others through our relationships”.
He adds: “To love, we must let go; we must move beyond the image of the other person that may have formed itself in our minds in order to find the reality. And a relationship can only be deep and enduring if we are moving beyond the image to the reality.”
And what is the essence of the reality, in Christian terms? Freeman again: “We are the image of God, and this image of God is made magnificently visible in Jesus, who reflects to us who we truly are. He is the mirror, as it were, of our true self...”
And just as we learn, in meditation, to let go of the “God of our minds, the God of our concepts,” [as authoritarian father figure] in order to love God and receive God’s love, so we also learn to let go of the images and concepts which prevent us from loving ourselves and others.
“Learning to love others means, [in the stillness of meditation], we allow ourselves to learn to accept others and see others for what they really are, not putting them into the moulds of our own emotions or our own desires or our own fears, not projecting our own feelings or images onto them, but allowing ourselves to see them and relate to them as they are in themselves. Therefore to be able to see our relationships as something that we share with others, as the sacrament of God’s love, bringing us, each of us and all of us, to wholeness, to the wholeness that allows us to share in the very being of God, as St Peter says (2 Pet.1:4).”
He continues: “It is love that divinises us. And we learn to love – to love ourselves, to love others - by entering into the mystery of relationship. So learning to love ourselves and learning to love others going hand in hand teaches us how to love God. It teaches us who God is, because it is only by loving that we discover who God is. ‘Everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God, but the unloving know nothing of God’ (1 Jn4:8). However many wonderful ideas [we] may have about God, [we] know nothing of God if [we] are unloving, for ‘God is love’.”
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All quotations attributed to Laurence Freeman are taken from his talks Aspects of Love 2 and 3. See:
https://meditatiotalks.wccm.org/cd/11hdMJ5kCLeVCmpspAHv?mc_cid=e3d45f729a&mc_eid=affb1ad4d3
https://meditatiotalks.wccm.org/cd/Qn3SG8B24bNk4jgkjEV8?mc_cid=01174b464f&mc_eid=affb1ad4d3