In the spring of 2011, one of my favourite albums was Kanye West’s “Monster”. I thought that it was fantastic and, truth be told, still listen to it from time to time. That particular spring, the Vancouver Canucks were making a run to the Stanley Cup finals and my family was moving to the house in which we still live. I can recall numerous times packing boxes, moving furniture, or simply dancing and running exuberantly after a Canucks’ victory, with headphones in screaming out the opening “Uh - uh, ea, ea’s” from the song “Power”,
“I’m living in the 21st century, doing something mean to it …”
My favourite song on the album is the song “Monster”, which consists of three lengthy poems including ones spoken/sung by Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj’s rap is so striking in its assault. The energy in its presentation and its lyrics are astounding. In Jay-Z’s rap there is a line after images of monsters and aggression that says, “Everybody wanna know what my Achilles’ heel is. Love, I don’t get enough of it …”
It might sound strange to say this, but I could connect with Kanye in regards to spiritual questions and identification of frailty, fear and hope common to humanity when he was producing music like that on “Monster”. When he began to release Christian worship music I was pretty much unable to connect. Many people disagree with me, but to me it had no heart. To me it was like Kanye was missing from the music. It certainly didn’t lead me to any spiritual considerations or depth.
In my final year pastoring an evangelical church I quoted a part of the Jay-Z rap from the song “Monster” in a sermon. I was pretty convinced that no one who would have been angered by it would bother to look up the rest of the lyrics to the song. I also chose the theme “All of the Lights” for advent one year and told only a few people that it came, not from the Bible, but from Kanye’s album. The title, that is, not the rest of the contents of the advent series.
I bring this up now because, rather sadly it seems, Kanye is back in the news. I’ll spare you the detailed entertainment gossip update, but the basic consideration seems to be that after his split with Kim Kardashian, Kanye has been “love-bombing” both his recent girlfriend and Kim Kardashian. This has been happening at the same time in which he has posted troubling things targeted at Kim Kardashian’s new partner.
Love-Bombing is term that has gained more traction recently. It is basically a phenomenon in which a romantic partner (often new) overwhelms their love interest with repeated, extravagant gifts, gestures, supposed acts of kindness, and declarations of love. People who have been love bombed often speak of how good it can feel, but also of how it is clearly upsetting and disturbing. Love-Bombing is often a warning sign of narcissism, self-centredness or a desire for control. It usually points to troubling things to come.
There is something like love-bombing in many organizations, groups, churches or cults. This can happen by way of an individual paying you a great deal of attention. Maybe a pastor or a church leader gets really involved in your life, helping you, being there for you as an emotional support and becoming a key presence in your life. In pastoral work I can recall repeated instances in which people in the church were latched onto by overly aggressive helpers. Often the helpers would then try to enlist people like me and other leaders to help out as well. In some cases, people who had practical, financial, emotional or mental health needs became enveloped by the shadow of the helpers, more and more dependent on them. It looked like charity and even compassion, and maybe it partly was, but it was also a disturbing drive for control and identity.
Some of the strongest differences I had with people in the church were with “love-bombing” types who seemed to spend hours and days helping other people in the church, but seemed driven by their own neediness rather than a sense of compassionate service. Love-Bombers can never be pleased. They’re insatiable. They demand attention and they stand in-between all other people and the people whom they adopt as projects. I guarantee that every evangelical church has some love-bombers in it. I have even seen well-meaning, loving people love-bomb others out of their own sense of mental or emotional pain. These can be the saddest cases, but the worst are the love-bombers who seem to help others as almost an act of aggression towards the world.
I recall one woman in the church who was a serial love-bomber. She gave inordinate amounts of time to help other people, even when they weren’t asking for help. She felt that she had a “deliverance ministry”, and would tell me over and over how she “prayed with them for four hours”. She disclosed to me all kinds of personal information which her project people shared with her. The multi-hour, intense prayer times implied, for me, not freedom and deliverance, but rather a growing control of the person being prayed for by the person doing the praying. It was hard to say such things though, because people who take on such roles become identified as spiritual superheroes and, in many cases, their projects speak very highly of them and how much they have helped. I found them to be not often spiritually strong at all, but actually spiritually frenetic and terrified. I suppose there is a parallel between love-bombing in romantic relationships. Kanye displays not emotional peace in such lavish presentations, but clear emotional disturbance.
If we are growing in awareness of love-bombing in relationships, we ought to grow in awareness of love-bombing in churches. The basic version of it is enlisting the congregation to help a neighbour in need by setting up elaborate schedules of meal delivery or similar. This kind of thing is great, in and of itself, but NOT AT ALL if it has the desired outcome of bringing the person in need into the fold of the church. Giving without expectation is love. Giving with intent of a particular result is love-bombing.
Theologian Karl Barth on “The Act of Love”:
To the extent that you cling to the result of your loving, you will not love, and you will destroy the very thing to which you cling. We cannot love in order to achieve something … Love is betrayed if we try to make it the object of this type of calculation.
I will insert here the obligatory note that most of the compassion and service to others that I saw in the church was done selflessly. It had a beautiful peacefulness about it. I think of one couple who I still know. They are not young themselves, they face difficulties like the rest of us, but they have given, over and over again, to help people in need or to care for those who are dying. They are an example of a love that we all hope to know.
However, there is no denying that churches become attractive places for love-bombers to connect with others. The most disturbing versions of love-bombing in church are the kinds that bring a person under the control of another. This is not Christian service or vocation. It does not point to the presence of faith. It points to insecurity, a need for ego affirmation; a failure to see others as people rather than as objects to fill some kind of emotional vacuum. The terrible thing is that too many Christian leaders and pastors turn out to be repeated love-bombers.
One of the most unsettling things that we can encounter with unfortunate frequency is the proximity of love and abuse. If someone is helping you or giving you gifts it is easy, and often correct, to assume that they are doing this from a place of love. It can also be hard to see that our own acts of charity can sometimes be more about us than about the recipient. Sometimes this is not a problem at all. The problems come when the connection is close. If you give a thousand dollars to a food bank it does not particularly matter if you did it for the right reasons. If, however, you give to someone closer and then you form a relationship, you will be faced with the reality of power. Power is not, in itself, a bad thing. It simply becomes bad when your giving to the other person arises from some kind of dependency in you that is otherwise masked.
I have seen some of the most extraordinary kindness within churches. I, myself, have been the beneficiary of some of this kindness and I remain humbled, grateful and even prayerful about how kind and self-giving people can be. I have also seen, within religious systems and churches, all of the marks of a kind of love-bombing. This type of behaviour inhibits spiritual growth and inhibits an awareness of the transcendent.
We can be tremendously thankful that God is not a love-bomber. God has been depicted as love-bomber by some religious power-brokers, but God is not a love-bomber. God’s love, to go back to the Barth quote, is given purely and entirely, not to get something out of us. This is one of the prisons from which much of the evangelical church needs to be freed. You don’t have to “pray the prayer” to be loved by God. You don’t have to do anything at all. God’s love is that pure. As my friend Jeff McSwain references in a book that he is writing, Julian of Norwich reminds us that “Our biggest problem is not our wretchedness, but our ignorance of love.” Love-bombing is a prison. God’s love, no matter what bad religion says, is freedom. The recipient of love-bombing wakes up to the terror that it was a prison all along in which they were being enclosed. Knowing God’s love does not have that sense about it. If you pick up that concept of God from a church in which you participate, then you should rightfully begin to ask what is really going on. The church might be “loving” you for the sake of the church, for the institution. God’s love is not about control. In God’s love we are free and secure enough to be ourselves and to grow.