Face to Face

Volume One: Missing Love

Folsom

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898146
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Face to Face is about personal relationships. Everyone talks as though they want one, but most of us are missing the strategies to live with this intimacy, especially with God. This book is an invitation to explore the ah-ha moments of a theologian who believes that theology should be practical and speak to where we live. Drawing from years of study in theology, biblical studies, counseling, and addiction therapy, this book is a creative conversation about what is missing in our most important element in life--our relationships. Its simplicity does not diminish its depth in penetrating some of the most complex questions of our age.

Chapter 1

Reinhabiting the Garden of Love

“If you wish to be loved, love.”

—Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

“When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.”

—Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)

“God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.”

—Jacques Deval

Something is missing. Never before have we had such amazing tools and toys that allow us to flourish in our human experience; yet, at the same time, a gnawing hollowness spreads into the fibers of our personal relating. Relationships disintegrate, marriages become dissonant, families disengage, communities crumble, our nation divides, our global connections are tense, and God is a diminishing shadow in the public sphere.

The Garden of Eden experience of walking with God is a forgotten ideal in this reality-show-obsessed world. Yes, there are exceptions: the loving families and good neighbors who mirror God’s original intention. But at the same time we are seeing huge advances, we are also experiencing profound breakdown. Scientists are mastering knowledge of the material world. Medicine is providing solutions to our fleshly frailty. Technology is developing an internetedness to our connectedness. But we are losing the threads of penetrating communication that weave together the many strata of our lives.

Where in this world can we find a serious investigation that engages the most important feature of human existence: our relationships? That is my quest, not for a misplaced Holy Grail, but for a “system restore” in the matrix of relating. We customarily bump each other’s bubbles of “personal space,” but yearn for an embrace that ignites the fire between us. We must rediscover who we are and how to meaningfully relate in simple strides that will build for a lifetime.

My initial step in this learning process was coincidental, but became a gift that formed my life’s trajectory. My first grand move out of my childhood home was a gentle step to the house next door. In the tragic chess game of life, the neighbors had moved away, and thoughtless renters had scarred its beauteous face, leaving decades of tender gardening a paradise lost. However, I remembered what had been, and offered to invest my sweat as rent to recapture the cherished memory of the landscape I still held dear. Memory and dream moved my able hands.

I loved the verdant gardens and pleasance of the orchard, but there was a special place in my heart for the kitchen. I especially cherished its huge west-facing picture window, where an observer like me could survey the daily arrival of visitors, the palette of light as it swept through the day, and the ever-changing grounds bringing the joy—and demand for attention—of a two-year-old child in full sprout. Windows create anticipation. Kitchens complete the connection as a gathering place.

In that kitchen, I had many conversations with Bob, a friend who moved in to share what was beginning to feel like a restoration of the Sistine Chapel. One day he told me, “On my gravestone, I would like it to read, ‘to have loved was enough.’” Though this sounded noble, something in me was unsettled, like trying to remember an old friend’s name so you can look her in the eye and start a conversation. I could see the immediate appeal of living as a gift, and dying with the pleasure of knowing you were well spent. But there must be more. I was not yet satisfied.

I searched for what was missing like looking for the puzzle piece that brings a face into focus. Each addition brings a joy as it remembers home, a delightful resolve as fingers feel the homecoming. Then it came to me one day: I want to have been loved when I lay on my final resting bed (hoping not to experience one of those violent ends).

So the motto that came was, “To have loved and been loved, that was enough.” Of course, at that time, just past the two-decades-old flag, I was hardly aware of how little I knew about what this might mean. It sounded beautiful and noble. I later came to see that the central task of theology as unfurled in the story of the Bible is to draw humans back into this life of loving and being loved, but not out of our human resources. We are called to live within the gift of love offered. That becomes the starting point for the logic of love that shapes a life of accepting and extending love in the economy of grace.

But we require new ears and eyes to overcome the controlling patterns of religious life. We must learn to see that, unfortunately, words can be tools of control that merely limit our world to another person’s set of expectations. “I just want you to be happy” sounds so innocent and good-hearted, but often comes in the form of a cookie mold that squeezes us into someone else’s happy end. For many, the Bible is construed as the Grand Editor of our lives. It has the feel of a tightly-corseted ideal to overcome the flabbiness of our humanity that misses God’s supposed ideal. But the Bible is much more interested in relocating us into a life of love. It cannot take us on short vacations to “a place of happiness,” especially when chosen by dysfunctional family or by traditions we do not own. The relationships that precede words are the heart’s true location for finding the shared joy that fulfills our humanity. Words can bridge our lives, give us unsatisfactory imitations of connection, or become roadblocks to understanding.

Over the years, I have found that words do not have fixed meanings. They are more like recipes. In our use of them, we must learn both to be playful and to desire health.

Harvesting fresh garden produce, a family might create unique edible art. Each day’s contribution creates a salad, but with lively, changing elements. It is still a salad, but new and nourishing even when components change. So with words, rather than fixed definitions, we need spiritedly-grounded invitations to share meaning and to let our expressions keep growing and changing in conversation.

Everyone knows what coleslaw is, but have you tasted Grandma’s? “Coleslaw” has many variations that are tied to the stories of each family; some taste amazingly the same (in institutions and stores), and some are wonderfully different with secret ingredients. Each word we speak has a recipe that is not the same for everyone. “Love” is not the same in every mind. For some it is distasteful; for others, it is a romantic delight.

We wish everyone thought like us in what they mean by each word. They do not. An entire sentence compounds the mystery, adding surprising meaning-ingredients to each salad. After some conversations and sermons we say, “Give me more of that!” Regrettably, some talks are either bitter or just don’t agree with us. We do not like their recipe in how they use particular words. Words can seem plastic, as if their wrapping has spoiled the taste.

One of the great challenges of theological thinking is to get all the different denominations and traditions to retire their sense of authority to define God and their need to exclude those opinions that differ. Words become power trips, people fight over thoughts and beliefs, and love is lost. We need to let God be God, and to give up trying to tame God through artificial portraits that plaster our mental space. We need to be surprised by joy at how we are drawn into a life of continuity with the God who is daily guest at our table, and experience a full freshness in the conversation: always loving, but always in new ways.

“Love” is possibly the most varied word in the “recipes” that lie behind it. That has been confusing for me and maybe for you. Over the years, we learn to think out of our mother’s use of love. We might easily assume our spouse means the same thing, and are later surprised to discover that only a few ingredients are the same. The differences can shock our palates and instigate debates about which is better. I have come to believe that we must accept each other’s recipes without eating the ones that make us sick. We need to be willing to understand the differences, and keep learning how to improve our recipes. By this, I mean that we might hold our language lightly and openly, to recognize that just as every word has a recipe, so too, those we speak to each have their cherished approach. This is true in all theological endeavors as well; we need to learn to use language to connect and explore, not to win a war.

“To have loved” is not a formula to replicate. Rather, it is an invitation to initiate savored movements, sampling and sharing life with another unique person. Experiencing their careful recounting of stories of pain and loss, triumphs and passions, and patterns of touching becomes part of our own “recipe” for love. Loving creates the space for others to come out and play. Loving makes life monumental.

I had seen gravestones as a reminder of a life well spent but now ended. Thus, gravestones can be Death Markers, but for me, this recipe-phrase, “to have loved and been loved,” became a Life Marker. It has given me an end-picture of what I want my daily involvements to look like so that the final reflection rings true and inspires the lives of others to take note and find their own story.

I had to learn these life skills the hard way. My life story is full of tending gardens and investing in meals to savor with others, but also wrestling through a divorce and remarriage. I spent two decades drinking deeply of higher education and learning from books, but have also collaboratively worked in five churches, each bringing a bounty of ingredients to my thinking, from the sweet to the substantially meaty. I have been a marriage and family therapist for over a decade, which has sculpted me during each session by exposing me to the complexities of human conflict, disappointment, and lost hope. But the light of hope is not lost to me. All these experiences have created a stained glass life of complexity through which my table is illuminated, spread with love-seasoned plates of edible art I invite others to share.

“To have loved and been loved” is a compass for me, giving a sense of location that helps to choose my direction. The power of love influences me as if I am moved by a strong force, like the magnetic North Pole, which orients me to the direction I wish to explore. It also shows me how to find my way home.

Today, the meaning of this life-phrase is still a mystery to me. That being said, I could talk for hours about what it has meant. I am confident that in the future, new hints of flavor will season this motto. I imagine unleashed moments when this catch-phrase will burst into life. It is like sitting in a fine restaurant, trying to figure out what is contributing that delicious fragrance to the treasure steaming before me. I hope this book invites you to keep simmering and playing with the recipes that guide your journey.

I am convinced that the central task of theology today is to discover the God who embodies love. God speaks, and we may respond. All of our God-talk must find its original expression in God’s game of love. If we say “God is love,” we must see the specific actions that demonstrate love played out in human history. God is not as interested in abstract ideas of love as in inviting us to join in his ongoing story of love. We can still use language, metaphor, and visual images, but recognize they are mere reflections of God’s dynamic reality, as recipe is to the filled plate before us. We must never be satisfied with the likeness and therefore miss the intimacy. We cannot systematize God like a pinned specimen to own and display. Rather, we must enter with mystery and wonder into God’s relational system, a complex jungle bursting with divine life. God’s life is not a museum to visit; it is an expansive garden of love from which to live.

You may wonder why I spend so much time talking of gardens, recipes, gravestones, and finding love. C.S. Lewis said—and I agree—that “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” I further believe that love is the serious business of living on earth. But not just any kind of love will do. The dominant human urge is to satisfy ourselves and think we are being loved. For the quest on which we will embark, we must discover anew the gift of love from God, who is the source of self-giving love. This God lives the harmony of love, united in a dance of a reciprocal resonance between three persons. They live an extended embrace to one another that then shares in a dynamic life of gifting. This three-personed God is the fountain from which any truly other-centered human love arises. We need to taste their recipe of love, born on earth in a garden long ago, which overcomes all our inclinations to separation and selfishness. That feast of fulfillment is the hope for which I have written this book. I want you to live with anticipation beyond your failures and faltering, disappointment in others, struggle for fulfillment, as well as the joys and seasons of courage. I desire for you to be renewed into a life made possible by the Creator’s love, that sings its deepest tune to invite you into a dance of delight. Divine love never lives in a soloed monotone. Creation and redemption are the initiation and final resolve in God’s symphony, still playing over the centuries in expectancy of a grand resolution. God takes broken pasts and entwines them into a rugged wreath of beauty.

Time is not always kind to our cherished past; Westview Apartments now replace both my family home and my neighbor’s property, my greenhouse of seminal thoughts and passions. The giant firs that still rim the edge of the combined properties are a living Stonehenge or ring of Ents standing in honor of the days that formed the culinary-gardener theologian I have become.

Although that past is gone, what remains is a deep ache in my soul for intimate relating that goes back to my childhood. For most of us, that yearning is the sign of what is still missing. You may be numb t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Reinhabiting the Garden of Love
• Chapter 2: Discovering Father
• Chapter 3: Voices in the Stark Night
• Chapter 4: The Unforeseen Storm
• Chapter 5: The “I” in Sin
• Chapter 6: Fear’s (Dys)function
• Chapter 7: Addicted to Love
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Further Reading