Why Love Wins

My reading list is insane.

Here, I'm not complaining about how many books are in the holding pattern.  I'm saying, "It's insane," as in, DSM-certifiable.   Having just dispatched statistician Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I'm now most of the way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.  Pascal is flawed but undeniably delicious, a delightful mind whose prose shimmers with a salon-sharpened wit.

The next book in the rotation?  A pastel-covered book by popular bestselling Christian author Stormie Omartian.  It's titled The Power of a Praying Cat, or something like that.   And yes, that's her real name, although I'm invariably tempted to write that surname O'Martian.

And then?  Then on to Rob Bell's Love Wins.  See?  Totally crazy.  Wild!  Wanton!  Utter chaos!

That last one I've been meaning to read for a while, particularly as my little church handed Bell's book out to our graduating seniors as they went off to college.  It seemed useful, a gracious and rational counterbalance to the callow dorm-room anti-theism they're likely to encounter.  But I hadn't read it.  Mostly, I've read reviews, some fluffy support, some raging bile, others more measured and balanced.

What intrigues me from my pre-reading, though, is that while Bell makes the theological case for the victory of God's love over all things, he doesn't appear to make the leap into the created order.

Of course we want love to win.  It's love, dammit.  But does it?  If we look out at the world, it often doesn't appear to be the case.  Love is for the weak and the bleeding hearts.   Love gets its [butt] kicked after school.  Love is cut down by AR15 fire as it puts itself between the children and the shooter.  And the kids still die.

Look out at the world.  It's red in tooth and claw, savagely Darwinian and seemingly loveless.  Partisanship wins.  Snark wins.  Hate wins.   But love?  Is there a rational case for the victory of the compassion that is at the heart of what Jesus taught?

Here, my wildly profligate reading has stirred a thought, one I'm chewing over in my mind.   Love wins because love is stronger.   Love is much, much stronger.  Why?

Because love can adapt, and hate cannot.   Love can change, and hate cannot.

A sentient being governed by love as a defining principle will approach another being as having something to offer.  It will encounter a new reality as a new opportunity.   If you love another, you can see from their perspective, moving beyond the confines of your subjectivity into a place in between.  We don't do that perfectly.  The existential walls between us are high.   But we can, nonetheless, get there.  With a little help, sure, but we can get there.

The individual governed by love does not exist wholly within themselves.   They may not embrace everything they encounter, but they're open to new things in every encounter.  That means that when the [poop] hits the fan, they're smart enough to duck, or to at least to close their mouths for a moment.

Love learns.  It grows.  It adapts.  It does not cling to biases.   That means that when the world changes, Love is ready.

Hate?  Hate doesn't do that so well.  Hate only knows one thing: itself.  A being governed by hatred is a being ruled by the self it already knows.  Difference and the Other are to be destroyed or subjugated.  Hate defines itself by rigidly clinging to what it is.  Hate wants power.  Hate wants control.  It seeks to dominate the world, to force the entire universe into the narrative of itself that is the only thing it is willing to hear.

And when it encounters the deep complexity of God's creation, hate rails and snarls and lashes out.  But what hate does not do, because it can't do it, is change.

Eventually, that means that hate is either destroyed by the change to which it cannot adapt or devoured by itself.

Love is what it looks like when sentient beings succeed.  Hate?  Hate is the defining feature of failed individuals, and doomed cultures, and species that have flirted with sentience and then regressed.

Lord help us.

Who Shouldn't I Like?

At a recent meeting in which I was asked my opinion about a range of individuals, I found myself in the peculiar position of being asked, only quasi-rhetorically: "Who DON'T you like?"

I've always had a relatively easy time getting along with most people. Generally, I find that there is more pleasure to be found in seeking common ground with another than whackin' away at them with my Mighty Mjolnir of Righteousness. Even in those instances where I find myself in diametric opposition to someone on an issue, that quest for common ground is still front and center.

Why? I guess I just have this weird fixation on grace.

It's gratifying to enter into a web ranting contest with a rabidly and profanely aggressive neoatheist and come out the far side with a sense that some mutual respect has been found. It's spiritually uplifting to have a strident fundamentalist start a conversation with you by hurling both scripture and invective, and work your way around to realizing that hating one another isn't necessary. Those conversations smell far more richly of victory than napalm in the morning ever could.

It doesn't always work, though. You can't always get folks to open up. Reason, humor, silliness, gentleness, and appeals to shared values and common humanity sometimes run crashing up against the brick wall of deeply seated hatreds and bias. People who have been so deeply hardened by cynicism and are woven through with negativity that they can't recognize any common value at all. Folks who are relentlessly narcissistic or engage in fetishistic worship of their own groupthink just can't recognize others as children of God.

And there are people like that out there. You just can't get through to them. I'm pretty sure I'd have trouble getting along with Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. He's just going to hate me, no matter what I do and however I approached him. By his standards, I'm monstrous, my wife and kids are the personification of evil, and I'm pretty sure there's nothing I could do to make our time together pleasant.

Maybe we could talk about fashion. He and I seem to have similar incompetence in that area. Or perhaps I could help him learn how to grow a real beard. That'd be a great topic, I'm sure.

Ann Coulter would be equally trying company. I'm progressive, and that means that I am someone to be vilified and mocked in terms that generally embarrass decent company. Like Ahmedinajad, she relies utterly on her ability to polarize communities and condemn those who are different. People who build political or commercial careers by demonizing others tend to be a tad on the hard side to get along with. And Dear Ms. Coulter really has put her heart and soul into making herself a caricature of the ranting, smug, and rigid conservative. That's why Ms. Huffington keeps her on retainer. If she ever showed signs of being pleasant to a leftist, she'd never publish a book again. It would also blow that whole fascist Cruella De Vil schtick she's got goin' on.

I'm also fairly sure ten minutes in the company of Perez Hilton would be nine minutes and forty seven seconds too long. As someone whose entire existence is dedicated to cattily defacing the lives and reputations and images (ew) of others, I'd doubt his soul has escaped unscathed. I could be wrong on that one, but whenever I've gone on his gossip site (research purposes only, mind you), I've felt like Nosferatu sunbathing on the Cote D'Azure. Only the other way around, if such a thing is possible. The absence of light is so intense, it burns.

Any openly gay man who can manage to be so impressively cruel, self absorbed and foul tempered as to draw censure from most of America's gay rights organizations must be a real joy to be around.

That I can't imagine being in close proximity to any of these folks is one thing. Liking them may not be possible.

But though friendship with folks like these might not be possible, hating them is also not necessary. Opposing? Yes. Resisting their influence? Viewing them as enemies of what is good? Absolutely. But hate never serves any purpose.

We are permitted to have folks we just don't like. That we still have to love them is the great challenge of Christian faith.