Magnanimous Self-Giving
Ash Wednesday
February 26, 2020
I’ve come to believe and experience that a chief characteristic of God is God’s endless Self-giving. God gratuitously gives away who God is. God is not stingy, but generously spends Divine mercy, compassion, love, and goodness on the world.
That this Self-giving is gratuitous means that we do not earn it, deserve it, or win some worthiness contest to receive it. God’s Self-giving is not conditioned upon our actions, our morality, or the vibrancy of our faith. We cannot begin any discussion of “unconditional love” until we jettison our notions that various degrees of spiritual performance get different quantities of God’s goodies.
Yet, at the root of most religious systems, humans have developed complex notions for how to win God’s favor. We teach them, preach them and instill them in our young and old. These systems work for crowd control, but they are generally unworkable in helping us relate intimately to God.
Self-giving that is not predicated on performance or condition is at the heart of any genuine love. Much of what we call love is actually manipulation, seeking to get a certain reaction or response from another person. True love does not manipulate, but rather gives without any expectation of return. Love can give anonymously without being recognized for the giving. Love does not offer itself to another because it wants a certain reaction from the other.
Love loves what is as it is . . . or else it is not truly love.
To be sure, this kind of loving is counter to the way we think about love. We were created for the kind of magnanimous self-giving that characterizes our Creator, but we have fallen into patterns that are much too self-serving to be unconditional.
Persons who are growing, though, tend to slowly let go of that self-serving nature. They begin to act with love, mercy, and compassion without need of reward. They know themselves to be loved and affirmed by God just as they are, and over time give up their efforts to win God’s love and approval. For most all of us, this is a long journey, the journey of a lifetime. It is the journey, however, that is our spiritual quest, a journey which leads us to be fully human and fully alive.
Give ear to these words on self-giving and love by Beatrice Bruteau:
Self-giving is the core idea in any treatment of love and personhood. What do we mean by it? Sometimes, in human relations, it means to give time, attention, emotional response, intelligence, creative skill, and bodily activity to another person’s benefit. Sometimes it means to sacrifice one’s material life in order to save another. It can also mean to procreate and to nourish and to teach. In general, it seems to mean to give what one considers oneself to be, as distinguished from what one has, to give what cannot be separated from oneself: in order to give it, you yourself have to go along and be present – you can’t send it by messenger.
Since we cannot “detach,” or separate, what we give when we love, we must give the whole of ourselves. This makes us aware that we are a whole, a unity. That’s why love is so integrating and why it, above everything, makes us “holy” (whole). Whenever we love, whether we love God or our neighbor, we must love with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and all our might. Otherwise, it isn’t love, because that’s what love means, giving your whole self.
And then, love has to be absolutely free. That is, it cannot be the effect or result or consequence of something else. It is not determined, not necessitated, not done under compulsion. It is not caused. But not only that. Real loving, divine loving, is not even done for some good and sufficient reason. God does not love us because we deserve it, because we are worthy, because we are lovable. Nor does God love us because we are unworthy, don’t deserve it, are not lovable.
[Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism: Rooting Ourselves in Reality (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1993).]
For Reflection:
o I am seldom whole. If I wait until I am whole or complete to begin loving, I will wait through my entire lifetime.
o I begin loving where I am, mixed motives and all. I offer myself, just as I am, to God for my own wholeness, for the sake of others, and for the healing of the world. I offer the reality of my life to God.
o I consider the beginning I will make today on the first day of Lent. To what is God inviting me?
February 26, 2020
I’ve come to believe and experience that a chief characteristic of God is God’s endless Self-giving. God gratuitously gives away who God is. God is not stingy, but generously spends Divine mercy, compassion, love, and goodness on the world.
That this Self-giving is gratuitous means that we do not earn it, deserve it, or win some worthiness contest to receive it. God’s Self-giving is not conditioned upon our actions, our morality, or the vibrancy of our faith. We cannot begin any discussion of “unconditional love” until we jettison our notions that various degrees of spiritual performance get different quantities of God’s goodies.
Yet, at the root of most religious systems, humans have developed complex notions for how to win God’s favor. We teach them, preach them and instill them in our young and old. These systems work for crowd control, but they are generally unworkable in helping us relate intimately to God.
Self-giving that is not predicated on performance or condition is at the heart of any genuine love. Much of what we call love is actually manipulation, seeking to get a certain reaction or response from another person. True love does not manipulate, but rather gives without any expectation of return. Love can give anonymously without being recognized for the giving. Love does not offer itself to another because it wants a certain reaction from the other.
Love loves what is as it is . . . or else it is not truly love.
To be sure, this kind of loving is counter to the way we think about love. We were created for the kind of magnanimous self-giving that characterizes our Creator, but we have fallen into patterns that are much too self-serving to be unconditional.
Persons who are growing, though, tend to slowly let go of that self-serving nature. They begin to act with love, mercy, and compassion without need of reward. They know themselves to be loved and affirmed by God just as they are, and over time give up their efforts to win God’s love and approval. For most all of us, this is a long journey, the journey of a lifetime. It is the journey, however, that is our spiritual quest, a journey which leads us to be fully human and fully alive.
Give ear to these words on self-giving and love by Beatrice Bruteau:
Self-giving is the core idea in any treatment of love and personhood. What do we mean by it? Sometimes, in human relations, it means to give time, attention, emotional response, intelligence, creative skill, and bodily activity to another person’s benefit. Sometimes it means to sacrifice one’s material life in order to save another. It can also mean to procreate and to nourish and to teach. In general, it seems to mean to give what one considers oneself to be, as distinguished from what one has, to give what cannot be separated from oneself: in order to give it, you yourself have to go along and be present – you can’t send it by messenger.
Since we cannot “detach,” or separate, what we give when we love, we must give the whole of ourselves. This makes us aware that we are a whole, a unity. That’s why love is so integrating and why it, above everything, makes us “holy” (whole). Whenever we love, whether we love God or our neighbor, we must love with our whole heart, our whole soul, our whole mind, and all our might. Otherwise, it isn’t love, because that’s what love means, giving your whole self.
And then, love has to be absolutely free. That is, it cannot be the effect or result or consequence of something else. It is not determined, not necessitated, not done under compulsion. It is not caused. But not only that. Real loving, divine loving, is not even done for some good and sufficient reason. God does not love us because we deserve it, because we are worthy, because we are lovable. Nor does God love us because we are unworthy, don’t deserve it, are not lovable.
[Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism: Rooting Ourselves in Reality (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1993).]
For Reflection:
o I am seldom whole. If I wait until I am whole or complete to begin loving, I will wait through my entire lifetime.
o I begin loving where I am, mixed motives and all. I offer myself, just as I am, to God for my own wholeness, for the sake of others, and for the healing of the world. I offer the reality of my life to God.
o I consider the beginning I will make today on the first day of Lent. To what is God inviting me?
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