I was with a group of friends a few evenings ago and, somehow, the conversation turned to ways in which the exercise of parental discipline has changed through the years. Some of those present recalled memories of being hit by their parents as an act of discipline. A couple of those people noted that they were disciplined in a similar manner in school.
When one mode of discipline was mentioned, quite a few people quickly and strongly identified with it:
What I remember most, the thing that made me feel the worst, is when my dad, my dad was loving and gentle, when he used to come into my room after I had done something wrong and he would sit at the end of the bed and he would say, ‘Your mother and I are very disappointed in you.’
It is a common experience for many who grew up in evangelical culture to have picked up a sense that this is how God thinks of us, in general. Maybe God is loving, but God is also, pretty much all of the time, shaking his head in disappointment. This is a troubling, non-hopeful, and, in some ways, not Christian view.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was a Cistercian monk, a philosopher, and a mystic. He eventually became St. Bernard. He had an intensity about him that was, likely at times, expressed as a judgmentalism. He was also enamoured of a love from God that loved us no matter what. Bernard was among those mystics who was almost inordinately drawn to the biblical book Song of Songs. I remember reading a quote from Bernard in a Christmas devotional years ago. It had to do with the infant Jesus in the manger. Bernard said that once we see Jesus in the manger, we never again have to wonder what God thinks of us. God loves us.
God did not enter human history as a head-shaking act of disappointment. Too often Christian theology is distorted in a manner that makes disappointment trump love. God’s love becomes harder to understand because it seems to have limits. God comes close, but not too close. God keeps enough distance to remain disappointed. Somehow, this is communicated as holiness. If you were given this kind of understanding of God when you were growing up, you may still need to be freed from it, even as an adult.
Jurgen Moltmann, in his book, The Theology of Hope, quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in describing how far God goes in exercise of love for humanity:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.
Here is how these things come together for me. I picture Mary and Joseph heading towards Bethlehem. Jesus is with them too, soon to be born. I don’t know how this actually looked, this couple walking towards the town out of civic, municipal requirement, knowing they would need to find a place for Mary to deliver the child. As I picture it, I picture also what is going on theologically. What does this scene mean in regard to how God loves us? I am comforted by the sense that God loves humanity more than God loves theology. God loves humanity more than God loves holiness. In fact, there can be no holiness without love of humanity. Somehow, these bigger truths are being played out in this couple’s journey.
Jurgen Moltmann, in another book, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, speaks about how bad Christian theology turns God’s judgment into a kind of karma. (This view distorts both Christian belief and the Hindu concept.) Bad Christian theology casts final judgment as “you get what you deserve,” an idea that you receive punishment or reward based on what we have done. Here are Moltmann’s words:
Anyone who teaches the principle of grace cannot at the same time teach The Last Judgment as apocalyptic karmic law. If at The Last Judgment we were to be judged only according to what we have done, then the outcome of the proceedings would be in our own hands; it would then be we ourselves who decided on our salvation or our damnation. We could then do what we wanted with judgment, and should need no God for it. We should only have to know the law, the consequences of what we do. A God who is bound to this law, and who can do no more than implement it, is neither free nor godlike. He is a slave of this law.
But (instead) the final verdict is the word of the free, creative love of God.
This brings me back to Bernard. We no longer have to wonder about what God thinks of us when we see the child in the manger.
This week, something else brought this kind of love to mind. I have been reading Gabor Mate’s recent book, The Myth of Normal. It is a book about societal distortions regarding health and mental health. It is a book, like much of Mate’s work, that speaks a great deal about trauma. In one section of the book, Mate quotes Gordon Neufeld:
Neufeld sums up eloquently what all young ones, whatever their temperament, need first and foremost. ‘Children must feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.’ The parents’ primary task, beyond providing for the child’s survival requirements, is to emanate a simple message to the child in word, deed and (most of all) energetic presence, that he or she is precisely the person they love, welcome and want.
This, I think, shows us what Bernard was getting at.
God loves us, each of us, all of us. We are precisely the one(s) loved by God.