Surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey: Ordinary Blessings. Denise Ackermann
is never a theoretical attitude. It is about doing, not just thinking or saying. It is more than the mere desire to relieve a person’s suffering; it is expressed in actions to do so. Compassion is practical. Compassion moves us to alleviate suffering and to oppose injustice, because we are able to stand in the shoes of another. Compassion is concerned with the dignity and worth of all people without exception. It is by doing that we seek justice, equity and respect, and it is by doing that we express love. Jesus, the man, lived a life of supreme compassion. He showed us the way by doing. There is no doubt that his actions were very unsettling to the authorities, that his actions broke barriers, and that his acts of compassion, immersed in love, changed lives. They changed mine. I now know that love and hope are real and cannot be defeated.
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I cannot separate compassion from love. Sagely, the Dalai Lama commented: “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” I agree, yet when Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians (16:14) “[l]et all that you do be done in love”, I quake. This is a pretty tall order. Is it possible to do everything in love? I fear I cannot meet this demand, but does my falling short negate being blessed? I think not. Paul seems to be setting a goal and in striving to reach it he uncovers a wondrous truth: when we stumble, God’s patience and forgiveness are endless. There is no condemnation.
The truth is we are able to love because God first loved us. The Taizé refrain: Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ubi est (Where charity and love are, there is God) affirms the truth that God is love. The foundation of love is God’s love freely given. We are loved and this awakens our ability to love in return. To be loved is to experience ourselves as affirmed, desired and accepted. I often wonder why this central truth about our relationship with God is missing from our creeds. We affirm our faith in a litany of events without a single word about the central truth of our faith – God loves us.
Love or agape is not about feelings of affection, or the erotic, or personal intimacies, or specific preferences, as valid as such feelings are. Love (like hope) is a practice or a way of life, often fraught with difficulties, sacrifice, frustrations and the like. In Eagleton’s words, it is “[…] far removed from some beaming bovine contentment”. In Jesus’ actions, love of God and love of neighbour converge. He is unconditionally committed to the well-being of others; he does not discriminate between people, and his love culminates in self-sacrifice – truly a hard act to follow. After relating the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.” So the practice of agape is mandatory, while at the same time it is a gift from God, who first loved us. Agape is for the flourishing of creation – all of it. It is part of living as a moral person, and is expressed in our actions and their relational consequences. God’s love is not only faithful but also forgiving; all that we have to do is accept this truth. If this were not so, there would be no hope of love covering our “multitude of sins” and forgiving them.
Sadly, “love” is an overused word. “I love chocolate” or “I love Ella Fitzgerald’s singing” are hardly what Paul has in mind when he says: “And now faith, hope and love abide […] and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). Love is easily corrupted when we lose Dante’s vision of that “love which moves the sun and the other stars” and settle for paltry substitutes. Our unwillingness to let go of our selfish needs, our greed and arrogance make for a pretty miserable world. But it can be different. To love another person means loving another not as an object, but as a subject. As a woman, I know about the struggle for subjectivity. I know that considering “the other” as a subject means loving others for who they are, and not simply for what they are to us. It is also a corrupt form of love to love only those we deem worthy of love. This is not Jesus’ way. For him all humanity is worthy of love. Another pitiful subterfuge is to think that loving Christ is unrelated to loving our neighbour. We end up trying to love Christ instead of our neighbour, and not Christ in our neighbour.
I can understand love only in terms of the relational. Love is about how I relate to God, others, myself and to the world in which I live. To love is to risk trust and commitment. Love means creating space for another in which she can flourish, while at the same time she does the same for me. This is love that is mutual – my desire for the well-being of the other is related to her desire for my well-being. Her fulfilment is my fulfilment. When love for the other is taken to the point of sacrifice, it is truly a human achievement. In Old Testament neighbour usually meant those who shared one’s religion. Jesus, however, broadens the meaning of neighbour. In the tale of the Good Samaritan, one’s neighbour is no longer simply the person who shares one’s religion, culture or nationality, but is the stranger one meets along the way. A further tweak is added to the practice of love when we are also told “[…] to love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk 12:31). Loving oneself is particularly stringent for it means that we should treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves.
In the face of these formidable demands, I like to think that we are made with the need to love and be loved; that it is in our divine DNA that stamps us as made in the image of God, enabling us to love God, others and ourselves. “Religious experience at its roots is experience of an unconditional and unrestricted being in love. But what we are in love with remains something that we have to find out,” says Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan. The process of finding out leads us into strange places that are not found on religious maps or in theological tomes. Early in the Gospel of John (1:38) Jesus asks prospective disciples, Andrew and Simon, “What are you looking for?” They respond: “Rabbi … where are you staying?” Jesus replies: “Come and see.” We enter unknown territory, brimming with surprises, because we want to “come and see”.
Our vocation to be daughters and sons of God means that we have to learn to love as God in Christ loves. Love is our only salvation. The love of God gave Christ to the world. The love of the Son for humanity, and our response to this love, is our salvation from meaninglessness. Love is the key to our existence. Love gives meaning to God’s entire creation. Dante’s vision is our call – to participate in that cosmic love that moves “the sun and the other stars”.
In Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton’s (1915–1968) words: “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” I am perpetually surprised by moments when I feel drenched with that love that knows no end and enables me to love in ways I would not have thought possible. Paul knew this: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). In the words of the classical statement of Christian faith, we no longer live but Christ lives in us.
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To have faith is to have hope. Yet this statement is often taken to mean hoping for the end times when all will be made new. Hope, however, is a lived reality in the life of faith, here and now. It is not easy to hope in a world that appears increasingly to be on the cusp of implosion. While I was writing this book, the United Nations hosted yet another large gathering to debate what can be done about climate change. The world’s economy is in dire straits. Hunger, violence and disease are decimating the lives of millions on our continent. What does it mean to hope in today’s world?
Through the countless dark moments of apartheid I had hope. I believed it would end and that justice and equality would eventually prevail. I devoured the banned writings of Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela; I chose to oppose the injustice of apartheid mainly through Christian institutions. I found a home in the Christian Institute, the Institute for Contextual Theology and later in the secular Black Sash. At no time did I feel completely without hope. Right would prevail. I learnt the power of political and social analysis; I embraced liberation theologies and I focused on the connections between oppressive modes, such as sexism, racism and homophobia. Those times shaped my story – a story of hybridity because of my mixed cultural origins, and a growing sense of marginalisation in parts of my own community, contrasted with a deepening involvement with the story of Jesus of Nazareth and what it meant in my context. I hoped because of him. And I learnt about what hope is and is not.
I learnt that to hope is never to surrender our