Thoughts on Love

There are psychological preferences as expressed through type, and then there are moral behaviors. A person’s type may determine how she expresses her values, but it does not determine the values themselves. A person’s type contributes to how he gives his gift, but the decision about whether or not to give the gift is a moral one.

Psychoanalyst and author Alice Miller writes that people who grow to adulthood without ever having been truly loved as children are similarly unable to truly love. In that case, “we can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love,” she writes. Only “a loved child learns from the beginning what love is.” Others have to learn what love is in adulthood if they learn it at all.

A person’s psychological type doesn’t determine whether she makes the choice to learn love in adulthood, or instead follows her natural but hypocritical inclination to act as if she were loving. Making decisions about whether to learn to love or not, whether to search for God or not, whether to seek out and develop one’s own true self or not, and whether to keep one’s word, commitments, and obligations or not are all moral choices. Not one of these choices is determined by personality or psychological type.

excuse me?

I think that growing up unwanted and unloved are good excuses for being a psychological mess upon reaching adulthood. But there’s no good excuse for failing to really learn to love rather than acting as if you love, no good excuse for failing to love someone with all your heart, with passion and sincerity, by desiring and acting in ways that serve the needs of the beloved in addition to serving yourself. I see no good excuses for receiving good in one’s life and hoarding that good rather than sharing it. There’s no good excuse for being given the chance to heal–perhaps many such chances–and refusing it or betraying your healer, as Judas did Jesus.

Jesus told a story about a wealthy landowner who prepared to go on a long journey. Calling three of his most trusted servants to him, he explained that he’d be gone for a very long time. “I’m leaving you three in charge,” he said, “so you’ll need this money I’ve budgeted. Make good use of it and when I return, we’ll have an accounting.” The first servant received one talent, which was worth nine years’ of skilled work–$20,000.00 in 2004 dollars. The second servant was given two talents, equivalent to $40,000.00, and the third servant was given five talents, equivalent to $100,000.00.

When the master returned, he learned that all but the servant who’d been given one talent had doubled his money for him. The one-talent servant had buried his $20,000.00 in the ground and returned it unharmed to the master. The master was shocked! “What?! You buried my money in the ground when you could have at least put it in the bank and earned me interest?! Why did you do that?!”

The servant replied, “Oh, it’s your fault, sir. Everyone knows what a hard-hearted man you are. I was afraid of your anger; it’s your fault I buried the money.”  Not fooled by the servant’s blame, the wealthy landowner considered the fact that two of his three trusted servants had valued something greater than their own skins. They’d been willing to overcome their excuses and fear to profit from the trust and generosity their boss had showed them.

“If you had really believed I am the hard-nosed bastard you say I am,” the rich man replied, “You would have put that money in the bank rather than risk having it dug up and stolen. You would have at least earned me the interest that money would have earned had I never placed my trust in you. As it is, you used me to excuse the smallness of your own heart. You’ve broken my trust and failed to return anything on my investment. You’ve just proved that you’re not the sort of servant I want in my business.”  The boss then took the $20,000.00 back from the hoarder and gave it to the servant who had doubled his $100,000.00. “Get that lazy servant who buried his money in the ground out of here!” he cried.

And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

love gives

Love is not a Scrooge McDuck. Love is a giver. Isn’t that the gospel? “For God so loved… that He gave…”. Love is a constant yielding in the back of one’s mind, all the way to and beyond the boundaries of one’s heart. Love makes me always aware of the yield sign.

It’s not easy to love. Love doesn’t come naturally to us. If love came naturally, we’d all do love like we do whatever else comes naturally: urinating, defecating, fornicating.  That love with its giving, yielding, believing, hoping, patience, and kindness isn’t natural to us is obvious. People are natural-born takers, doubters, demanders. We’re impatient and unkind. We give up, we don’t run the race to the end; we let people down.

It’s all so jolly as we go along loving those who are easy to love, our friends, the ones similar to us, those who agree with us and think our plans are just grand. But just let a disagreement occur, a difference of opinion. It stops being such a fine, jolly frolic when our differences draw blood. Then the stakes are serious.

When people are willing to give up their right to have their own way, I know that they are truly awake and alive to love, regardless of their psychological type. Extraverts and introverts alike are able to love. Extraverts may do it with a lot of words and production, and introverts may do it quietly without drawing much attention to themselves, but the character of the love will be constant.

love yields

Love yields. Because love yields, it’s not possible for love to have its way in a conflict in which one person wins at the other person’s expense. When my loved one demands his own way and I yield to him, one of us has loved and one of us has not. Love has a concern for each person in the exchange, each person in the relationship.  

“Love hurts, love scars, love wounds, and marks,” Nazareth sang, but love doesn’t have to achieve its ends through suffering. A person can always try to choose the path of love, a path that says, “I don’t want to win at your expense. I’m more than a vampire, sucking your blood; I’m more than a leech or a parasite, always taking and giving nothing in return. I hear that I’m causing you pain, and I’m sorry. What solution can we arrive at that will serve our mutual interests? What can we do to achieve peace between us?”

That kind of caring doesn’t arise from personality type; it is rooted in good character.

Generosity

There’s a new exhibit of Native American art at our local art museum. We went last week and spent hours gazing at art in all sorts of media–watercolor, pencil, ink, pottery, textiles. At some pieces, we laughed out loud; at others we giggled nervously, and at others we gasped with delight. It was a feast for the eyes and soul, a reminder of just how much we need these thumbprints of the human spirit.

My son’s girlfriend, a senior at university and a Native American herself, works at this art museum and has learned a lot through her classes and work. I love being around people like her because I learn from what they’ve learned; and I love to learn. At a display of pottery made by Pueblo Indian Maria Martinez, she told us a story about Maria she’d learned in art class.

Maria specialized in making black-on-black pottery similar to that made by the ancient Pueblo peoples. As Maria became better known, demand for her work increased. Each piece fetched a nice price, so soon other Pueblo Indians began to replicate Maria’s work and sell the pottery to tourists and art collectors.

When the white folks figured out what was going on, they began to demand that Maria sign her pottery, which she did. The other women would then bring their pottery to Maria to have their pots signed, so that all could share in the bounty produced by Maria’s name.

Standing there in the museum’s chilly air, looking at Maria’s flawless work, I wondered at her. How different a spirit she had than is typical among white folks, indeed among any folks these days or any day who seek to hold on to what they think is theirs, to possess and be possessed by, to hoard what there is not enough of. I was reminded of Nobel Prize winner N. Scott Momaday’s concern that the “removal of the spiritual matrix of the traditional life, the theft of the sacred” would eventually ruin not only Native American culture, but America as a nation. One effect of the loss of a spiritual True North, he said, was that people would lose traditional cultural principles such as those the Plains Indians lived by: bravery, fortitude, generosity, and virtue.

Momaday, like Martinez, knew that doing one’s art well required more than the courage, resolve, and fortitude to merely practice one’s art with regularity. “Writing is a way of expressing your spirit,” he said, “so there’s much more to it than the question of material success. You are out to save your soul after all, and be the best thing that you can be in your whole being.”

“I would like to live my life according to those four things. I would like to do it in my writing, as well as in my other activities. That’s what I believe. I tell students, writing is the expression of your spirit, but you must live by certain ideals, and they must inform not only your writing, but the way in which you  have breakfast with your mate, as well.”

As Momaday said and Martinez exemplified, it is not enough to simply become  our best selves, to live our best selves; generosity is required. Virtue must be applied, for “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).

Our trip to the museum to wallow in art reminded me to keep a loose hold on my own spirit, on what I call my work, ”my writing.”

It, like my very life, is not really my own.

Tremors

I noticed the tremor in my husband’s right hand about six weeks ago. His hand had taken to fluttering like a moth that has spent its energy flitting around the porch light all night long, and by morning is reduced to crawling along the porch, beating its wings in useless efforts to regain a position near the light.

“Why is your hand shaking?” I stupidly asked. “I don’t know,” he answered, staring at his hand as if it belonged to another man. “It’s been doing that lately. Maybe it’s all these years of working with it.” Yes, maybe. Maybe lifting and using a four-pound screw gun hundreds of times a day for 30 years will do that to a man’s hand. “You’d better go to the doctor,” I suggested. “Maybe try alternative medicine first, an acupuncturist.” We all know what medical doctors do: prescribe and cut. Not much else. You might as well go to a blood-letter or have leeches applied as go to a medical doctor.

So to the acupuncturist he went, to Dr. Lee, a medical doctor who had returned to traditional Chinese medicine after discovering that western medicine wasn’t achieving the healing ends he expected it would. “Nerve damage,” he said, and stuck hundreds of needles into my husband over the course of six weeks. “Drink this tea to protect your nerve endings,” he advised. And my husband drank the tea.

After six weeks, the tremor seemed to improve somewhat. But not enough to warrant ignoring it. And then I noticed my husband walking funny. His left arm swings at his side when he walks, but now the right arm seems tucked against his torso, stiff. Something is wrong. I think Parkinson’s Disease. I begin to Google. I begin to feel fear. The more I read, the more fear I feel.

I do the math: my husband is 55 years old. Our youngest child is 10 years old. In 10 years she will only be 20 years old, not even finished with college, if she is even able to go. In 10 years if my husband has Parkinson’s Disease, he may not even be able to work. In 10 years if he cannot work, and he is disabled, we will not have enough money in savings or retirement or in anything that will help us survive. We’ve put everything we have into our children, our home, the church, and other people. We’ve saved for emergencies and stayed out of debt, but we’ve not hoarded money for ourselves. We’ve lost most of our contributions to our 401(k)s like everyone else. And because we own a business that depends on my husband being healthy, an illness or disability could mean we lose all our future income, including our ability to pay for insurance. We could be reduced to living on only a few thousand dollars disability income monthly. There is no way we can survive on that and keep what we have. We might lose everything.

I spent several nights awake in the wee hours, terrified and sick to my stomach. I could see, during those wee hours, how attached I am to my comfort. I recalled why we bought our property and moved out of a smaller and nearly paid-for house into this large house we built with our own hands. I felt a bit tricked by God, for it was He alone who could inspire us to take such a big risk at our ages six years ago, building this house. Sometimes God inspires you to take big risks. We took big risks every time we had or adopted a child. We took big risks when we stepped out by faith and started a business. We took big risks every time we gave sacrificially or invested in others rather than ourselves. We have always done things in large ways. But “the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” they say. Has our time of comeuppance finally arrived? Had we worked all those years for nothing?

During these wee hours of terror, my fear shows me my attachments. Before we had so much stuff, I wasn’t so attached to stuff. When we were poor, I had no aspirations to be rich. The happiest times of my life were spent in the smallest surroundings.

But now that I have large surroundings and lots of stuff, I can see that I want either God or I to be in control of what is given, of what is sacrificed. “We gave it up for the sake of the gospel,” I want to say. Or let the tornado come. Let the house burn to the ground. “Act of God,” I’ll say.

But I do not want a disease to dictate what happens to my husband, my children, or my lifestyle. I do not want to be a Wal-Mart greeter at age 65. I do not want to have to go to work in my 50s. I do not want to work every day. I do not want to spend the healthiest part of the end of my life taking care of my husband and my parents at the same time. I don’t want to caretake people until I die.

I do not want to serve in those ways. I want to choose how I serve. I want my service to God and others to feel good and comfortable to me, to be based on my choices. I don’t want things forced on me, and I don’t want to be imprisoned by “ought” and “should” and “must” all my adult life. I am full of pride and self-will and I can see it so clearly when I’m caught up in my own fear and dread, imagining the worst possible outcome.

The shake in my husband’s hand has sent tremors through my world. It has shaken me to the core, and every day I feel an aftershock. I am as close as I can be to the epicenter of his shaking hand, and my heart quakes.

Tremble, and do not sin;
Meditate in your heart upon your bed, and be still.
Offer the sacrifices of righteousness,
And trust in the LORD.
Psalm 4:4-5