Faithful Radiant Love

Faith is a tricky business … because having faith means loving love. Having faith means being truly in love with love.

What do we have faith in?

In the other half of my life I’m a scientist (yeah, go figure). I have faith in scientific method and I have faith in the probability theory that underlies much of scientific methods. I have that faith because I have life experience of the model never failing.

I’m also a pretty serious cook. I have faith that what I cook will come out the way I intend and be good to eat. I have that faith because I have cooked a lot, and because I have messed it up a lot, so I know not only that it always works when I get it right but also I have that faith because I have seen precise causes of muckups.

I have faith in my husband’s love. I have a lot of experience of his love—forty-three years now—and we both have lots of experience of muckups and thus I have absolute faith in his love even as I forgive the occasional muckup.

I have faith in God too, although I have to admit even as a priest, that’s much harder. I know science and I know empirical method and I know probability theory and I know cooking (even pie dough) and I know my husband but I have to stop and think hard about how I know God.

Sometimes the way I know God is by knowing what God is not. God is not some old guy pulling strings or making a list and checking it twice. God is really a lot more like making pie dough or probability theory or even my husband in that I know that God is pure love and that means that I only am in the presence of God—in the presence of pure love—when I am able to rid myself of obstacles that keep me from love. I know God best when I am able to love, to feel love, to give love, to love myself.

Having faith means loving love. But the reality of our daily lives is that we mostly are too busy, or not interested, or whatever … to be loving people. And if we do not love, we do not receive love.

That is the whole message of the Gospel: to receive love, you first must love.

We have been following the saga of Job. You know how Job’s life went, pretty much like yours and mine the last couple of years. No matter what you did more [ahem] fell on your head. No matter how hard you worked more [ahem again] fell on your head. No matter how much you cried out to God more and more of that stuff [ahem] fell on your head.

But, why was that? Probably because we forgot to love. This is the really, really, really hard lesson to learn. The one Jesus says is like a camel through a needle, and all those other wonderful metaphors in Jesus’ stories. It is because to love, to actively give love when you are in a mess and a world of hurt and a world of stress, sometimes it’s just too much.

And yet, it is the only way. You have to love, to be loved. Job gains generations and centuries of life (!) and everything imaginable all by loving.

This morning instead of sitting quietly with my coffee listening to the Oregon rain (ok, it’s one of those “atmospheric river cyclone bomb things, but hey, we need the rain) I had to take my husband someplace (notice, “I had to” there’s that [ahem]. While I was driving around in circles waiting I heard an interview on the NPR show Freakonomics with economist Arthur Brooks (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/arthur-brooks/), who says we could have worked our way quickly out of the pandemic by conquering contempt. He suggests we pretend to have love by pretending to smile. Here’s the kernel of it (interview by Stephen J. Dubner):

DUBNER: So you’ve collaborated with the Dalai Lama, and you asked him once what to do when you feel contempt. And his answer was, “Practice warm-heartedness.” … And then, as you write, he suggests that you think back to a time when you answered contempt with warm-heartedness, remember how that made you feel, and then do it again. Is it really that simple? Because that sounds like even I could do that. 

BROOKS: It’s amazingly good psychology. It’s reversing an automatic process. There’s a famous exercise that I teach to my Harvard students now. I have to teach a class on happiness. And when you’re feeling unhappy, if you want to feel happier, if you put a pencil in your mouth and bite down so it’s sideways in your mouth and you’re biting down on your molars, that will actually strain the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corner of your eyes, giving you a little crow’s feet. And that signals to your brain that you’re doing a Duchenne smile, which is the only smile associated with true happiness, and it runs the causality in the other direction, and you will literally feel happier. So that’s what I’m suggesting. Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s an act. It’s a commitment. It’s not a feeling. And in so doing, you will run the cognitive process in the opposite direction, and you’ll get results. And that’s what the Dalai Lama was telling me. He was just not telling me in those wonky, nerdy terms.

What do you know? We can be more loving, Godly people, just by smiling even with pretend smiles because when we pretend we release happiness hormones that actually make us loving people.

This is why the Psalms are full of paeans of praise for the unashamed radiance of love—because love is easily produced, love is easily reached, love builds up, love is reliable. In this we can have faith.

Mark’s Gospel (10:46-52) is the story of the healing of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, who is healed by his faith. Even blind Bartimaeus knew that Jesus embraced love, unashamed unfailing radiant love. And after regaining his sight he “followed him on the way,” which means a lot more than that he followed the group along the road. It means he followed the way of love, because after all it was his love that healed him.

This sort of thing can be a tough lesson for LGBTQ people because we so often find ourselves in Job-like circumstances. Yet we have the innate capacity for love. Love is what defines our very identity. It is this fullness of love that is both our gift in creation and our call in life. Love is the core of our faith, if we can believe and act, if we can reach love’s dimension.

Proper 25 Year B 2021 RCL (Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22); Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52)

©The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.