The Risk of Love
Love has to be one of the most talked about and written about things in the world. The apostle Paul has a wonderful definition in 1 Corinthians. I would add one thing to Paul’s list. Risk. I think it is important to add this for two reasons. First it is an obvious element in love and secondly it is important for theology.
The statement that “God is love” is ubiquitous in theology and religious sentiment. But if God is love then God must also be at risk. Many of the ontologies employed by theology neglect this idea and reduce God to a bystander. This has tragic consequences for the formulations of theology and the personal piety that ensues.
Perhaps an analogy would be apt to demonstrate that love entails risk. Most parents know very well how loving their children places them at risk all the time. Loving and raising children is more than just nurturing and guiding them as they grow. At times it means that one accepts a risk to oneself. That risk can be both physical and psychological. Parents are willing to take on both these risks. There is something in the makeup of parents that will risk life and limb to protect their children if they are in danger. Stories of this abound. But perhaps an even more prominent element of risk is psychological risk. As children grow there will always be situations that arise where the parent goes through psychological torment about the child’s situation. The vicissitudes of life come down on children just as they do for adults. Whether it be a child with cancer, a child that becomes addicted, or just the normal everyday challenges that meet children as they forge their own identity and deal with social situations and life challenges. These are times where even when the parent does all they can for their children there is always an underlying anxiety that persists as things play out. For many that anxiety puts the parent at psychological risk. The parent may loose sleep, feel panic, suffer depression, or many other serious psychological maladies. Parent are willing to place they own wellbeing at risk for their child. And for many that risk is not trivial. It can effect health, create financial ruin, and serious effect other members of the loved family. But parents do it because of love. If there is always the potential for personal risk in raising and loving a child should we not also attribute this to God? If God is love then God is also at risk.
If God is also at risk in God’s love for us then theology must take this seriously in its formulations. Many do not. In classic theism God is not at risk because God is perfect and immutable. In process theology God is not truly at risk because God only prehends what happens in our lives. This would be akin to a parent trying to influence what happened in their child’s life, feeling their pain, but not truly entering into personal risk. In my view, the only theological formulation that honors God’s risk is that based on the idea that God is a living God and that we are aspects of God. A living God enters into the very fabric of finitude, contingence, the potential for evil, and the loss of self. For a living God the risks are real. They carry all the risks of non-being, fragmentation, dis-integration, guilt, hopelessness, and anxiety. For a living God these are just as real and dangerous as they are for us. But God accepts these risks out of love. God’s love creates life where there is the potential for both great good and great evil, great beauty and great ugliness, great meaning and great meaninglessness. This is the structure of life. Only in this structure is there a life worth having or wanting. One could imagine a God who did not choose to live. One that rejected the risk of life and instead remained pristine in the Godself. But that is not the God of reality. God chose to live and create living aspects of Godself to love and participate in both the struggle and wonder of life.
There are certain crucial points that a compelling and lasting theology must confront and find an answer that is both true and existentially meaningful. That God’s love entails true risk should be one of them.
I’m not quite sure about this.
What exactly is at risk? For us? For God?
I don’t perceive the risk anymore. I’m not a big fan of most of A Course in Miracles, but there is one line that resonates deeply: “Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists”.
The only risk is that we will temporarily identify with the contingent and therefore suffer, temporarily. What other risk is there?
Comment by MatthewCromer —
Hi Matthew,
I guess I have a different view of life. I feel that the risks are real and not illusionary. And that if all is God then the risks are real for God as well. Now I would say that the risks that God faces are in the living aspect of God and therefore limited but if God has a living aspect then both the wonders of life and its horrors are part of God.
But even one accepts that risks are temporary or because of wrongheadedness, that does not diminish their destructiveness. In my view the suffering that people experience can still be devastating. The loss of health or even one’s self in insanity why ever it occurs is real to the person. If the risk is real to the person then, in my view, it is also real to God. Otherwise God becomes a mere spectator who may empathize with that loss but remains untouched otherwise. To me this is not love.
Comment by Steve Petermann —
I think the best way to approach this question, which is basically the question of theodicy, is to step back and look at the assumptions which are present.
The core assumption here is that what we are, fundamentally, is billions of separate entities associated with a body, born into a world, subject to risk of suffering, pain, and death.
In this model, the identity is with a particular name and body and history. In this model, I “am” Matthew in a fundamental way. It is my core identity. So whatever happens to “Matthew” is happening to me, existentially.
But that is not how things are seen now, from here. It is seen that “Matthew” is simply one story among billions, and that the thought that “I am” actually applied to “Matthew” was simply, as Einstein wrote, “an optical delusion of consciousness”. And so the suffering that was experienced existentially is transformed into a story of suffering that is simply witnessed and allowed and therefore unproblematic.
What is now “Me” is all of it, all the stories, all the perspectives, and yet none of them at the same time. The actual “Me” is the absolute empty unconditional love that allows every thought and perception and form to unfold. The identity has been withdrawn from the limited and contingent form, “Matthew” and the particular conditioning and ideas of past and future for this form. “Matthew” is not me, any more than the “Matthew” in my dream last night was a full embodiment of my waking consciousness. Or any more than the character in a movie who I temporarily identify with until the movie ends, the curtains fall, and I remember I am not the character who appeared on the screen.
As Eckhart Tolle writes: “Suffering requires a self and a story which is believed in”. Once the unconditional belief in the little me and the story begins to slip, the suffering is no longer fully believable.
Eventually it is seen (by no one) that there never were any separate, suffering beings, only stories playing themselves out within the One Consciousness.
Of course the apparent life of the movie-character “Matthew” continues to unfold, and the egoic structures persist within that (although for the large part much less problematically now that identity is not believed as being “Matthew” anymore. But those things are not happening to “Matthew” (who is simply a movie character after all), they are simply unfolding within God, as in reality they always have done and always will do.
There never was a separate, suffering self, and never could be. That was just an idea, believed in for a while, but which eventually was seen to be inconsistent and incoherent and therefore could no longer hold together. . .
So in the end, suffering is simply an attachment to problematic ideas of identity and ownership of an assumed self-center and a body and a story of this little me with a problematic past and an even more problematic future.
Comment by MatthewCromer —
This discussion represents the classic perrenial problem of the One and the Many. In the East two of the main schools of thought were those of Nagarjuna (sunyata (emptiness) and anatta (no-self)) and the thought of Ramanuja and his qualified monism (or what I call an aspect monism). It seems to me that either approach is logically sound and can only be adjudicated from a personal sense based on experience.
I align myself with Ramanuja in an aspect monism but I do appreciate your movie metaphor. The one I use is author/story. However in the author(God)/Story(Us) metaphor the characters are real but only in a unity with the author. As such the suffering of the characters is their suffering but it is also God’s.
Comment by Steve Petermann —