n his concluding observations to Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, John Swinton notes that ‘Vanier continues to draw our attention to fear as a source of violence. Perfect love overcomes fear, but fear turns us in on ourselves and opens us to the possibility of violence’.
Gentle concern
Community is made of the gentle concern that people show each other every day. It is made up of the small gestures, of services and sacrifices which say ‘I love you’ and ‘I am happy to be with you.’ It is letting the other go in front of you, not trying to prove that you are in the right in a discussion; it is taking the small burdens from the other.
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
On love, maturity, emotions, living in the present, problems, grief and stoicism
Here are some more thoughts from Alain de Botton’s book On Love.
First of all, on falling in love:
Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together,’ when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
On maturity and emotions:
We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.
On (not) living in the present. He asks, ‘Had there not been many times when the pleasures of the present had been rudely passed over in the name of the future …?’ and talks about ‘anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening’, only to conclude that ‘the inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely … to live’.
On problems: ‘One can think problems into existence‘.
On grief: ‘Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks: “Why me? Why this? Why now?“‘
On mature love:
… mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated ….
On stoicism:
At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defense against the dangers of the affections of others, dangers that would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.
There is much to ponder in these quotes.
A terribly and sadly ironic Christian tradition
Commenting on Ephesians 5:22-33, John Dominic Crossan notes:
What is most striking about these instructions … is their mutuality and reciprocity. We seem to have spent much more Christian time debating the details of wifely obedience than discussing the details of husbandly self-sacrifice …. It is surely terribly and sadly ironic that Christian tradition demanded subjection from wives and then, rather than demanding self-sacrifice from husbands, transferred that obligation to wives as well.
Well spoken! Once again, this is from God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now.
The radicality of God’s egalitarian Christian meal
… those earliest Eucharistic meals were not our present morsel-and-sip ritual but a true meal, called the Lord’s Supper because it was the style of share-meal created by Jesus as a meal-symbol of equality within a community that believed in God’s ownership of food as the material basis of life itself. The radicality of God’s egalitarian Christian meal opposed the normalcy of Rome’s hierarchically patronal meal.
Thus John Dominic Crossan in his fascinating book God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now.
One key difference between the sexes
In his new book Levels of Life, which, among other things, is about the beginnings of photography, Julian Barnes comments on ‘one key difference between the sexes’:
when a couple who had been jointly photographed returned to examine their proofs, the wife always looked first at the portrait of her husband – and so did the husband.
Anything wrong with that?
Barnes continues that ‘most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves’. And I can relate to that, too.
Karl Möller 