Friday, February 25, 2011

Habitual Love

Our freedom consists of two things, really. The lesser freedom that we talk about most frequently is what we call freedom of choice. It's a freedom from--from bondage, from compulsion, from enforced conformity. At its most mundane, it's the freedom to choose carrots or peas as you move through the cafeteria line or, if you're my son Andrew, to reject them both and choose a cookie instead. Freedom from is an important freedom. It's freedom from slavery in the many senses of that term, and I don't mean to diminish it by calling it a lesser freedom. It's the freedom that I wrote about in my last post about habits and our freedom from their domination.

But there is a second freedom. It is the freedom for something, or as monastic thinkers would put it, the freedom to love whole-heartedly. Freedom for implies freedom from. I can't be free to love one thing if I'm bound by my love of another. Whole-hearted loving is grounded in the ability to choose what or who we love, but it also goes beyond this choice. A simple example: I love my wife, and I find my love is able to deepen to the degree that the freedom of this love shifts from being the freedom of choice--the freedom to survey an array of women each day and choose which one I should love--to a freedom simply for her, so that my energy is not exhausted by a daily choosing, but can devote itself to knowing her and loving her more fully. I don't choose each day to love Cyndi. I simply love her, and the question for me is how I might move more into that love. (Not that I always give that question the attention that I should, or that my other habits don't crowd it out all too often.)

To say that I simply love Cyndi is to say that I've formed a habit of loving her--and I realize that can sound dangerous. Love that is mere habit sounds dull and repetitive--almost an afterthought. It sounds that way, but if you've moved to such a non-considered relationship, then you really aren't loving at all. Loving,..., true loving implies mindfulness. It implies paying attention. It implies a heart that is engaged. The true habit of love is whole-hearted, and so it can never be an afterthought.

To be mindful, then, is a two-step. It's to attend to our habits so that we might free ourselves from the habits that bind us. But we do this so that we can form new habits--habits of love or, more particularly, habits of loving what is life-giving. Mindfulness both brings to our attention what gives life, and then it allows us to give ourselves (in freedom) to the habit of loving what gives life.

The Gospel passage read in the lectionary this coming Sunday reminds us that we can't love God and mammon. The suggestion is that we free ourselves from the possession of material things---that we loose the bonds of that habit--so that we can give ourselves fully to the habit of loving God. A first step in the deepening of the spiritual life is to move from an obliviousness to God to a place where we ask ourselves if we will love God. A second step is when we stop asking ourselves if we'll love God because we are now asking ourselves how we will love God. That's the habit of love, and it is truly a gift.

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