The Opposite of Love

In a book about the Italian emigration to America around the turn of the last century, there is a marvelous image describing how the departing immigrants used to bring on board balls of yarn, leaving one end of the line with someone on land.  “As the ship slowly cleared the dock, the balls unwound” and “after the yarn ran out, the long strips remained airborne, sustained by the wind, long after those on land and those at sea had lost sight of each other.”  (from La Merica by Luciano DeCrescenzo.)

It’s a very powerful image, isn’t it, of the ties that bind us to those we love; and when love is strong, of our reluctance to let go of one another.

I wish to speak this morning, not so much about the power of love in our lives, so much as about what becomes of us when that redemptive power of love is missing or displaced, for whatever reason.  I want to talk about what might be called the opposite of love, something very difficult to define exactly.  I know I’m in deep vocabulary trouble here, right from the start.  When it comes to love, its meanings and its opposites, its synonyms and antonyms, the dictionary is not much help.

As one of my favorite writers, Sam Keen, points out, the minute one starts to think about the place of love in our lives, “a wild bunch of interesting (and unanswerable) questions bursts forth.”   There is something foolish, he warns, about the idea of defining or measuring love. “We don’t have a science of amourmetrics,” Keen writes. 

“Quantifying the gossamer quality that is said to be like a red, red rose or an itch that can’t be scratched, that is said to be the senior partner of faith and hope, would seem to be a fool’s errand.

…. The great lovers throughout human history have testified that, in the final analysis, we do not define or measure love but are defined and measured by it.  The more dedicated we become to the practice of love, the more we come to understand that it is the poverty or richness of our love that defines our sense of what is real.  We experience the self and world in radically different ways when we are exiles living in isolation from others and when we are at home within a compassionate community of our kindred. 

 ”Ultimately,” says Sam Keen, “love reveals itself to us as more than a feeling, more than a psychological state, more than a sociological phenomenon, more than a bond that unites separate beings in friendship or sexual ecstasy, family or community.

 ”….Ah, but how do we begin to think clearly about love?  It is easier said than done.

Analogies and metaphors abound where exactitude fails us.  “….Love is like: a red, red rose, a hunger, a warm heart, a pleasure bond, a contract to fulfill mutual needs, a promise, a having and holding, a fire that warms or burns, a mother’s milk that nurtures, a grafting of two shoots onto a single root stock, a bewitchment, a falling, a way of valuing, a taking of responsibility for another, a willful intent to cherish, an intimate communication, a chemical response to a biological attraction, a positive addiction, et cetera, ad infinitum.”  (Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved.  Bantam Books, New York. 1997. pp.27-29.)

But whatever mode of love one wishes to name – romance, life partnership, friendship, charity to strangers, the love of parents for their children and children for their parents, the love we have for a work, a place, a cause – it is possible, indeed one can argue finally, that it is necessary for every healthy human being to develop the art  of love in one’s life.    I like Sam Keen’s formula.  Every  mode of love, he says, is ultimately perfectible, refineable, made richer and more powerful in our lives through the same “crafted exercise of compassion, kindness, and  wholehearted and wholeheaded passion.”  (Keen, p.30)

Wholehearted and wholeheaded passion. …what a great phrase.  How do we keep that alive in our lives, in our loves, in our family life, in our church life, in our society?

Some years ago, when I was studying the history of the first Puritan churches in New England founded in the 1600′s, many of which eventually evolved into Unitarian and Universalist parishes in the 1800′s, I came across a curious phrase which actually appeared quite often in old Puritan prayers.  The phrase is, “Spare us, O God, from a dead heart while yet we live.”

A strange prayer, isn’t it?  Yet it was one which 17th century New Englanders found somehow consoling.  A dead heart, to these passionate New World pioneers, meant a heart devoid of feeling, lacking zest for life.  The indifference of a dead heart, historian Perry Miller tells us, was a not uncommon theme in early Puritan preaching.

In prayer after lengthy Puritan prayer, these old Calvinists sought deliverance not only from temptation, but from the scourge of what they called a “dead heart” – from numbness of the spirit, from the death of mutual caring for one another and for their God.

Their fervent prayerful request strikes us, at first, as stark and disconsolate and joyless.  But listen closely to this prayer and go beneath the words if you can.

“Spare us, O God, from a dead heart while yet we live.  Spare us from the failure to love each other fiercely enough.  Spare us from the deadening effects of cynicism and despair.  Spare us from an unfeeling spirit while yet so much remains to be done in our lives.  Hold us fast, God, keep the passion for beauty, joy, and peace alive in our souls.  Spare us from a dead heart while yet we live!”           

Two centuries later in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986, Elie Wiesel offered a surprisingly similar insight into the state of the world and our reaction to human tragedy and crisis.  The words are as fresh today as then.  Wiesel wrote,

“If there is one word that describes all the woes and threats that exist today, it is indifference.  You see a tragedy on television for three minutes and then comes something else.  How many tragedies have we seen recently?  How many wars, how much suffering has been reported to us?  There are so many tragedies, a sense of helplessness sets in.  People become numb.  They become indifferent.

 Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.  The opposite of love is not hate.  It’s indifference.  The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.  The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.  The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.”

I want to suggest this morning that as it is with great social problems and questions, so it is with our personal lives and relationships.  The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.  How did James Baldwin phrase it?  “The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” 

Indifference kills more marriages and relationships than you can imagine.  It eats away at the fabric of relationship and allows people to grow apart.

And as it is with individual relationships and friendships, so I have seen it to be true even with congregations.  If you wonder why some congregations manage to stay alive for 175 years, through good times and through hard times, and why some congregations do not, it rarely has anything to do with economics.  It has everything to do with the quality of caring that some congregations manage to encourage both within themselves and outward to the communities around them.  It has everything to do with an atmosphere in some churches that says programs like a Pastoral Care Team are primary to the mission of this congregation.  It has everything to do with the primacy of caring over the entropy of indifference.

I want to offer three antidotes to indifference this morning, three starting places where each of us can work to keep indifference from strangling the spirit.

The first is the spiritual concept of consciousness.  Consciousness in its simplest terms is nothing more than spiritual eye-contact.  To become conscious of something is to be aware of it, to see it, to place it in the mind’s eye, to personalize it.  When we speak of “raising our consciousness” what we mean is seeing something on a new level, comprehending some truth in a deeper, clearer way.  It’s a spiritual process which changes everything because once we’re truly conscious of something, we can never be indifferent about it.  It’s like making eye-contact with the beggar in the street or the driver in the next lane.

Spiritually alive people are people whose consciousness is always in the process of being raised.  They are constantly personalizing their world, their society, and their relationships.  Spiritually alive people have made eye contact with their world, with its pain and fragility, with its suffering.  The first antidote to indifference then is to open our eyes, to look, and to become conscious of the world around us. And in that consciousness, if you will, to recognize that we are all of us tied together by the fragile yarn of compassion.

The second antidote to indifference is that “wholehearted and wholeheaded” passion  that Sam Keen identified.  Marshal McLuhan wrote that we live in a society that encourages indifference and which distrusts the power of personal passion. And as a consequence, because we distrust passion, we discourage personal commitment and conviction.  It is not coincidental that we have so many passionless institutions, passionless churches, passionless public policies, and passionless professions today.

It is my experience that spiritually alive people almost always have some kind of great passion in their lives which they cultivate.  Something they love to do, something they passionately enjoy being involved in, something they burn about.  It doesn’t really matter what it is — whether its politics or stamp collecting, social reform or flower arrangement or church work or work on their relationships — spiritually alive people aren’t afraid to burn about something, to get excited about something, to be enthused.

And third, along with consciousness and passion, I would name focus  as an antidote to the indifference of our time.  We live in such a complex age, with so many issues vying for our attention and crying out for our energies, that the tendency is to throw up our hands and disclaim the ability to do anything at all to improve the world.  What difference can I make, anyway?  I am but one person with limited abilities, limited talents, limited influence, and god knows, limited energy.  What difference can I make?

We refuse to focus.  We refuse to get involved anywhere.  We become indifferent.  Focus.  Choose.  Pick something to get busy with, to get involved in, to work on, or contribute to.  You can’t do everything, it’s true.  You’re not God.  But you know what?  Until God show up, you’re all we’ve got!  Pick something that needs changing in this world and lend the few stubborn ounces of your weight to the side of justice and righteousness.  Focus.

Consciousness, passion, and focus.  Three starting places for combating the indifference in our world, in our homes, in our hearts.

A poem for you in closing.  It’s by Robert Francis.  It’s entitled, “Summons.”

“Keep me from going to sleep too soon

Or if I go to sleep too soon

come wake me up.  Come any hour

of the night.  Come whistling up the road.

Stomp on the porch.  Bang on the door.

Make me get out of bed and come

and let you in and light a light.

Tell me the northern lights are on

and make me look.  Or tell me the clouds

are doing something to the moon

they never did before, and show me.

See that I see.  Talk to me till

I’m half as wide awake as you

and start to dress wondering why

I ever went to bed at all.

Tell me the walking is superb.

Not only tell me but persuade me.

You know I’m not too hard persuaded.”