The Sauntering Pilgrim

It’s a mystery to me how the thing we want most in life, the very essence of life itself – the treasure greater than all treasures, the pearl of great value (Matt. 13:44-46) – should be the most elusive. It seems at times as if our creator made us with an insatiable desire for that which is hardest to find.

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) noted, “There is a god-shaped hole (or vacuum) in the heart of each [person] which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the creator.”

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim,” Pascal wondered, “but that there was once in [us] a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This [we try] in vain to fill with everything around [us], seeking in things that are not there the help [we] cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God” (Pensees 10.148).

Twelve hundred years earlier, St. Augustine (354-430) wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (Confessions). It is perhaps Augustine’s most often quoted phrase, because it captures something that resonates deep within all of us: the desire to be filled and fulfilled. We all have it. We try to ignore it at times, but still it remains.

That God-shaped hole, that enduring restlessness, that desire to be filled and fulfilled, I believe, is the desire for relationship – not just for any relationship but the desire for authentic relationship, the kind of relationship that is our spiritual home. It’s the desire that links us to God and to the beginning of creation, and it links us, as a species and as individuals, to our place in creation.

In the very beginning of creation’s story, God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). We are not created simply by God; we are created by a divine relationship, and we are created in the image of that relationship. Divine, cosmic relationship is the essence of who we are; it is our substance and our identifier; and it makes us who we are most authentically as human beings. The name for that relationship is “love.”

In the law of life spelled out in the Torah, we read, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) and “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). Jesus affirmed the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And the second is like it, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” No other commandment, he said, is greater than these (Mark 12:30-31, etc.).

Love is repeatedly reaffirmed in the Christian scriptures. “You do well,” James wrote to the church, “if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (James 2:8). Saint Paul wrote that “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). Note that he drops the commandment to love God and places the whole load on loving our neighbor as ourselves. And again he wrote, “Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:9-10). Other examples abound.

Now here’s where the scriptures need a little help, I believe. For the commandment to love is not a commandment to do something, as if God requires a certain kind of performance or obedience to an edict. The commandment to love is really a reminder of who we are, of what we’re made of, and of what we’re made for. It’s a reminder of the image in which we are created, the image of authentic relationship that is complete in itself. It’s a reminder that to the extent we live in that original, authentic relationship – with God, with others, and with all of creation – to that extent the reign of God is perfected in us, and we feast at the banquet of eternal life.

But here’s the ironic thing. According to Dr. Andrew Weil, the physician and for thirty years an advocate and practitioner of integrative medicine, relationships are our greatest challenge because they remind us how much we still need to learn. That’s why growing and developing relationships is an essential part of our spiritual work (“A Loving Prescription,” in Handbook for the Heart: Original Writings on Love, ed. Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield).

At its core, any pathway to growth in spiritual life or growth in faith must include growth in our relationships with others, particularly those with whom our relationships are most strained and stressed, most conflicted, or most broken. That’s why all-inclusive forgiveness is essential to a life of Christian faith. It’s in working to understand and heal our relationships that we are swept up in Christ’s gospel of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:16-20) and like prodigal children again find our place at home with God (Luke 15:11-32).

Finding such relationships, such love, can seem difficult to the point of being impossible. Most of us, most of the time, like the Johnny Lee song says, are “lookin’ for love in all the wrong places / Lookin’ for love in too many faces / Searchin’ their eyes / Lookin’ for traces of what [we’re] dreaming of.” We get seduced by images of love, images of relationship, that our culture has taught us to look for. We need another image, another definition of love.

So here’s my working definition of love in the Christian sense, my definition of relationships as we are created to have them. To love someone, to be in authentic relationship with someone, is to value that person. It is to recognize that person as having an essential, indispensable role to play in God’s ongoing creation, even if I don’t have a clue what that role might be. It’s to recognize that without that person, my own life would be essentially diminished, so I could never be the whole person God is creating me to be. And then it is to act toward that person accordingly, to develop a practical ethic of all-inclusive community, so no one is left out, devalued, or disadvantaged by my action or inaction.

We don’t start by seeking that love, that kind of relationship, because that love will not be found anywhere out there, not because it doesn’t exist but because it must be discovered within and liberated for life in this world. It won’t be found in heaven one day; it will be revealed here where God-incarnate dwells. It will not exist in any other place or time if it does not exist here and now. So pray that we may see and live the love that is ours already. ▪