Does love flow from integrity or integrity from love?
This has been a question that has driven much of my own writing for three decades. In light of the clear incongruence of my own journey, noted as recently as in today's earlier blog—"A Personal Update 10/26/23".
The beginnings of this question arises from a challenge to the classical notion in theology that God in essential nature is loving, eternal, holy, all knowing, all-powerful, filling the mass of the universe and beyond. Dr. Ray Dunning, a favorite Naz theologian, first introduced me (if memory serves) to a variance on a theme; God is love. In terms of God's Trinitarian inter-relational essence that's it. God's mercy, holiness, sense of justice, peaceful intent all flow from love, rooted in Love as a lake is to the stream from which the lake emerges. In short the integrity which is how God acts is the direct result of God's very being—love. In deed, in God integrity lacks all context or meaning without its root, "God is Love."
To the same point, I remember another theologian of the church for whom I have high respect--Dr. Tom Oord--challenging me1 as to why I found it necessary to hyphen "love" as 'holy-love' when speaking of the Trinity of God? I remember initially thinking that my response was contextual; for the sake of those listening. If from a more conserving tradition it would allow my emphasis upon "love" to get a more complete hearing. If, on the other hand my discussion was from within the larger community it was an attempt to clarify a more robust "love in quality" than is generally held in modernity. While each is a valid reason within those contexts, I have overtime usually dropped the hyphen when referring to God. Upon reflection, my deeper reason for qualifying love as holy is that I remain a bit afraid of love, or allowing God the room to define the uniqueness of the Father—Soirit—Son with such a potentially scandalous word. Yet it is the only term in any language that gets at both the larger Biblical motif and my own personal experience of God—as love, from which every other experience and/or quality draws definition. The Incarnational emphasis in scripture requires the breadth of "mystery" that only an un-hyphenated love can 'act'. Love, after all, is first a verb. One need not define it to know it.
It also strikes me that what is ideally necessary for God is actually not true in us, who are human. Kindness and integrity, though qualities or expressions of love, live tenuously in us. The fluidity of an "event driven reality" which 'frees' God to be, often falls short in us. We rarely express love well, because, unlike God, we rarely live love well.
Love (God) is the active Presence, as the Eternal Son or Cosmic Christ, that holds the universe together and so Love is not only the essence of our relational God but is the gifting that allows particals, billions of light years from one another, to live in creative tension with one another. Love then is the very essence of what is, is (to borrow a phrase). Meaning itself, which Einsteinium science is still unpacking rests on the premise that perception and mass (time and space) inter-act; thus presupposing sentience, Love!
In contrast to God, our relational existence of necessity (in experience at least) grows from a very different place than God's, which ofcourse is the real problem. In us it is always both/and, holy-love if you will, precisely because in the gathering experience of ourselves we cannot separate love and integrity. Love is our time and integrity our space. One without the other always distorts the other. Love without integrity is sentimental mush. Integrity without love is prudish, arrogant.
Love is the inter-active experience which allows meaning or narrative to emerge inside time, like a particle of light making its way from the Big Bang to our experience of it in space some 4 billion years later. Integrity is, in us, the skeletal frame or substance which gives rise to our very appreciation of our particular of love transversing even our little part of the universe. Integrity allows us, in the fluidity of our lives, to see and thus act in ways which hallow or create meaning.
Bringing it home to my sin filled addiction:
To live as though sexual intimacy could be had in moments of space, disconnected from time (narrative or love) is chaotic. Like all chaos, casual sex is fun, but ultimately destructive, for it is living as if we are seperate, autonomous beings, unrealated and at play. The dance is explosive but results not in matter going somewhere on a journey, but in dark matter, increasing the weight of our acts precisely because we insist that such intimacy is going no-where. Over time, it will either explode causing great pain for others or implode, destroying the narrative of love that is the meaning of self.
And where is God in all this primordial stuff of our lives? As the creative, suffering Lamb slain from both before and in time (Revelation 13: 8c, John 19: 28-37 NUV). God is love and therefore has integrity, kindness of heart, passion about injustice and impatience with arrogance. One cannot yet say that of us, for love and integrity may each exist in our distorted selves apart from the other, however incomplete each may be. This incongruity between love (as narrative) and integrity (as experience) forms the very tension Paul describes when he says “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it" (Romans 7:15, 18-20 NIV).
In the darkness of my own sin exploring ever deeper in casual and sensual experience I felt strangely at home and within myself, peace. My senses were exploring what my conscience too rigidly denied. The character quality of tender respect towards every person, especially women was now suddenly being expressed in what I knew were very wrong associations. In every moment I was respectful, responding according to what I perceived a given woman seemed to need. It felt like, and in terms of a frightened little boy growing up, was loving.
It was much later, several months after leaving those "casual and uncommitted" moments, that I have begun to listen deeply to the Spirit. I can now see how, in the very context of exploring the edges of this hidden world, I was "exploitive and harming." Given the context of a paid massage, my behavior was necessarily, inherently demeaning. Any woman, for whom my attention and theirs would not last a moment beyond the experience created a meaningless connection for time (narrative, meaning) and had been emptied into space in like manner. In addition the highly systemic nature of power (via money) centric sexual touch was the real 'meaning' and like dark-matter, hidden in plain sight—whatever the pretend or real tenderness exchanged.
The awareness began when at the altar of my new church and just before "holy-communion." (There's that hyphen thing again). I wrote about it in "I Faiked Jack", my 1st Primer unpacking the darkness and struggle that had taken hold.
From: "I Failed Jack," Chapter 10, Reflection e, "Just Keep Your Eyes on Me", Pages #363-364
"Terry, can you not see that in this communion between you and me, there is and has always been a very real sharing of life?" I nodded my head before Jesus continued. "You receive from me the very love and wholeness of The Father as I take from you the ideas, feelings, often the broken spaces and sin in your heart. In this place we exchange life."
(I saw where this was going. In my mind I remembered the recent reflection wherein Jesus helped me see again that every woman I had been with I was now ‘One’ with spiritually. The absurdity of 'casual sex' was apparent. Now, in the bread and wine it was evident that in the same way, I had brought to my Savior each woman and the vulnerability inherent as unwilling participants of The Cup; women already known to God as God's own. The fact that inwardly I had treated each (as opposed to the pornographic and fantasy-based chatting) as real, human, vulnerable and not as only mere objects of pleasure, made my sin and abuse worse for me, for each woman and for Jesus, not somehow innocent in a measure.
"My son," Jesus continued as I took the bread of his body into my mouth. "Terry, 'casual' is the real problem, for you and each woman. You are treating as a passing pleasure, soon forgotten, that which is as close to holy communion as a human can get. It is an exchange of spirit. And in the one or two who may have actually felt that from you, it became just one more movement away from the real, the sacred—even from my healing them. For in sex, as in communion, the real and sacred cannot be separated by ‘casual’. That is why you always said there were only two conditions to communion— authenticity and a recognition of the cost of the grace of Presence, given. ...from this day forward, do not treat sex as an end but, like the Eucharist, a means to another end—intimate love and friendship."
I blew out my breath, slowly, deeply. "Jesus," I said, "then I shall ever commune only with my lady and not another, if ever she can emotionally be with me in that way, given my betrayal. ..please help me." As I drank the cup, what burst into my mind was the memory of Joetta and my wedding and our time of private vows, as music was sung. I remembered that in that moment as no other I had the sense that Jesus was a witnessing partner with us.
(End of quoted section)
What remains essential is that character and love are available to and in us because of Who is with us in this vast universe of experience. Our humanity is always, ever dependent upon God's relational (Love) qualities (Integrity, kindness, reverence, hope) given in time and space. In Christ Love is and is ever expressive in character and heart. In us, God must build a vessel (in mass or space) that can contain and express Love. Because we do not operate in a vacuum but in an ever growing "meaning" which outlives even the universe, ours is an eternal hope.
Thus surrendered trust is simply a reflection of that reality. What in God is simply "love" is apprehended in us as "holy-love" until we at last, “when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2 NIV).
God, help me I pray. Terry
God's response: "I know, O Lord, that your laws are righteous, and in faithfulness, you have afflicted me. May your unfailing love be my comfort, according to your promise to your servant. Let your compassion come to me that I may live for your law is my delight."
Psalms 119 verses 76 - 77.
1 I cannot now recall if the challenge to the phrase "holy-love" came from some personal communication by email or a passing comment at a conference or from one of Dr. Oord's writings.
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