Setting the bar

Most of us are familiar with the command “Love thy neighbor.” It’s the contracted form of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” found in both Matthew 19:19, 22:39, and Leviticus 19:18. For those who are not familiar with—or inclined towards—scripture, it is still easy to understand—and appreciate—this principle in terms of the nearly universal idea of The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you). Instinctively, we get it. Be kind. Do no harm. Don’t treat people shabbily. Go the extra mile for another.

But I was especially challenged by a passage Martin Luther wrote in his commentary on Romans as it pertains to this verse. Perhaps you will be, too:

“First, we can understand it in the sense that both the neighbor and one’s own self are to be loved. But in another sense it can be understood that we are commanded to love only our neighbor, using our love for ourselves as the example. This is the better interpretation, because man with his natural sinfulness does love himself above all others, seeks his own in all matters, loves everything else for his own sake, even when he loves his neighbor or his friend, for he seeks his own in him.

Hence this is a most profound commandment, and each person must test himself according to it by means of a careful examination. For through this expression, “as yourself,” every pretense of love is excluded. Therefore he who loves his neighbor on account of his money, honor, knowledge, favor, power, or comfort, and does not love the same person if he is poor, lowly, unlearned, hostile, dependent, or unpleasant, clearly has a hypocritical love, not a love for himself, but a love for his neighbor’s goods for his own benefit….Therefore this is the hardest commandment of all.” (Luther’s Works, 475)

Each of us will be challenged by this in different ways, but for me the challenge comes in loving those who are hostile, dependent, or unpleasant—not just occasionally, but chronically. And yet that is what is being asked of us. Of me. Of you. Luther is just as clear about the other Commandments. For example, about honoring one’s mother and father he specifies, “however lowly, poor, feeble, and eccentric they may be.” (The Book of Concord,401)

In other words, there are no outs. No justifications for our own failure to love except our own failure to love. Which is not just about feeding the poor or saving the world— acts which also reward us with the great feeling of doing good—but about how we walk in ordinary, seemingly uninspired circumstances.

So the next time we find ourselves surrounded by grumblebears and whiners and gossips and shrews and naysayers—terms that apply to any one of us on any given day—let’s consider that we are being given the opportunity to grow in love. And pray for the grace to take it.

Alone in a room

Sarapion the Sindonite travelled once on a pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Sceptical about her way of life—for he was himself a great wanderer—Sarapion called on her and asked, “Why are you sitting here?” To which she replied, “I am not sitting; I am on a journey.”

From The Desert of the Heart, Edited by Benedica Ward

Rapid growth

I came across a lovely site today: studiobeerhorst.com. Fascinating family. Art that connects, at least with me. This image——entitled “Hummingbird” by Rick Beerhorst——seems apt for a season of study where the mind races and the world disappears and the spirit soaks up a new language like a child. May your heart, too, quicken at the prospect of some new thing to learn this fall…

Pax
Heather

Love wins

The Road to Williamsport

Today begins the official quest for Little Leaguers all over the world….winning their way through fierce Regional competition to make it to the Little League World Series. To celebrate, I’m sharing a brief excerpt from The Pitcher’s Mom, a moment, no doubt, that most of these young baseball-loving families will face. Play Ball!!

The physics of baseball.

The same moony, wandering eye that prevented Jill from keeping stats, had, over the years led her to stockpile, in that dank and fruity cellar of perception, patterns of athletic behavior that had orchestrated themselves, unwittingly, into a theory: at no time in a pitcher’s life—not before, not again—was the opportunity for dominance greater than at the age of twelve. At eight or nine, new pitchers missed the strike zone as often as they hit it, and even then, at a speed that was well within the average batter’s ability to catch up. But by twelve, the golden year of Little League baseball, the year for which Little League families had long squirreled away their grandiose hopes, that same 45-foot span from the mound to home plate had become for the pitchers like the climbing structures of their dying youth: child’s play. The best of them could place a ball with near-surgical precision and back it up with enough power to trump the reflexes of the pre-algebra laden, geography-sopped, testosterone-flooded 12-year-old brain. Physics, neurology, stats, life wisdom they would all bare Jill out on this. And so it was, as the season came to an end, on every major field of every Little League park in America, the burden of critical games was no longer carried by the twelve boys on either team, but on the steady, thickening shoulders of two, the outcomes of championships often hinging on a single walked batter, a desperate, blindfolded whack of the bat. Ladies and gentleman, we have ourselves a pitching duel!
Dodgers vs. Yankees.
Gus vs. Zach.
Jill vs. Rod.
The game was scoreless after five innings. Jill no longer worried about Gus’s arm; he had struck out ten batters already—one more than Zach—three of them in the fourth inning. His arm was fine. “C’mon Gus, one, two, three,” she shouted, stalking the dry yellow grass between the bleachers like a veldt as her son walked to the mound for the top of the sixth.
To the first batter, Gus threw four straight balls, the last one high and wild. “Alright, buddy, settle down. Let’s get the next one.” Gus walked the second batter and the rumble began, the tremors of blood thirst gone too long unquenched. Savagely, Jill growled, “Right here, Gussy!”
The first pitch to the third Yankee batter was a strike. So, too, the second: a swing and a miss. But 0 and 2 was not an out. Neither was 1 and 2. 2 and 2. “Full count!” the umpire called. Jill doused her snatched cigarette man in an old Coke cup and shouted. “C’mon, you’ve got this guy!” The fourth pitch was not even close enough to argue.
“Time.”
A thousand heads (all right, but it was two hundred easy) turned as Gus’s coach walked out of the dugout and approached the third baseline. One step across that line and Gus would be pulled. The duel would be over. It would be anyone’s game. The Coach placed his sneaker on the white powder and stopped dead, waiting for Gus to come to him. He placed his hand on Gus’s shoulder, formed between them a reprieve in the air.
Jill’d always wondered what manuals these men consulted. What special coursework in sports psychology they’d completed to prepare them for such crucial tete a tetes? Searching her own archives for inspiration—Whitman, Kipling, FDR, Dear Abby—she found there was no shortage of choices. But discernment, this was harder to come by. How was a person to know what a boy like Gus needed to hear at a moment like this? Whether to push or to coddle, to goad or encourage. It was not just the language, but the tone, the pacing, the subtext, the implication of the well-placed pause. Her lips fluttering madly, she stood on the sidelines, destiny hanging on the every word of a man whose specialty, according to the sign on his truck, was termite control.

The talk.

How d’ ya feel?
Fine.
We need to hold those runners.
I know.
Just gimme some strikes.
I’m trying.
Alright then, go get ’em.

(from The Pitcher’s Mom by Heather Choate Davis)