The new month seems to come around so quickly, it is very easy to believe in the speeding up of time that is prophesied. I used to wonder if I were the only one who felt it, but lately I hear many people express the same thought. All of which leads me to appreciate anew how precious time is, and how important it is to think carefully on what we value.
A long time ago I wondered what were the qualities I most admired, and would like to have become part of my character. I thought then, courage, integrity and compassion. Of course there are many others as well; generosity of spirit, patience, gentleness, diligence, there are so many. But if I expand those basic three, I realize I can include almost all of the others.
I have heard courage described as ‘that virtue without which no other is safe’. The more I consider that, the more I come to think it true. If you draw back from pain you will never face unpleasant truths, because they can hurt very deeply, and of course they require action to put right what is wrong, or if that is not possible, then to learn to bear it.
Without courage you will never love, because love always risks pain. You may be rejected, the person may fail to be all you needed or hoped for, they will certainly be hurt at some time, and you will feel it with them. In order to love you have to put your own concerns second a good deal of the time.
Integrity is only too rare. It includes honour, complete trustworthiness, a wholeness of heart, even a purity. You must have a ruthless honesty with yourself. And that certainly takes courage.
Compassion is the greatest of all, as we have been told so often. The word ‘charity’ is used scripturally. But it is not just a ‘feeling for’, it is a ‘feeling with’. That can require a great effort. People have experiences that are different from ours and we have to make an emotional leap to understand, which takes time and effort, imagination and patience. We must put our own limitations aside and listen to something beyond our present knowledge. Above all we must cease from quick judgment, sometimes from judgment at all.
Compassion surely includes gentleness, generosity of spirit, patience, the ability to forgive, and yet when necessary still to tell the truth. Love ‘tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’, but it does not enable people to make excuses for faults and continue to indulge them.
If you love someone, you wish for them to ‘fulfil the measure of their creation’ and do everything good that they can. But you seek the wisdom of the Holy Spirit in how you do that. You NEVER trample on another person’s agency, force your will upon them or judge for them what is good.
All in all, it is a pretty comprehensive virtue.
Now the question comes, am I further along the road towards those virtues than I was a year ago, ten years ago? Am I certain I am facing in the right direction? Am I learning?
It is so easy to say ‘I love you all’ to the congregation, when what you really mean is that you have no ill-will towards anyone. Absence of ill-will is not love, it is merely a small move in that direction.
Perhaps the essence of loving is seeking to understand, even when it is difficult and may take a great effort, and a change in thinking. Loving does NOT mean – ‘you please me’, ‘I need you’, which is essentially about yourself.
Loving has a lot of sharing in it. ‘I saw something beautiful – look with me!’ ‘I heard something funny, laugh with me’. ‘I have discovered a new fact, isn’t it interesting?’ ‘Something terrible has happened, grieve with me’. ‘Or marvellous – rejoice with me’ – and let me enjoy with you what you have seen, heard, or learned. I will listen while you explain what I don’t yet understand. I want to hear what you care about’.
If you say ‘I love you’ and walk away, you may be deceiving yourself that you love, but it is unlikely you will deceive anyone else. Friendship consumes time and emotion. It requires effort, generosity of spirit, patience, the ability to forgive, and above all the ability to take yourself from the centre of the picture and put someone else there – not all the time, but much of it.
We spoke last week of David and Jonathan, as an example of great friendship, and then were guided to consider what quality of friendship we offered to those we care for. Such things as loyalty, honesty, the keeping of confidences were mentioned. It was a lesson with a lot of subject matter, so we did not get time to delve deeply into empathy, but many of us will have thought of it afterwards, when we had time and space to do so.
The story of David is a tragic one. He began being favoured of God above all others of his time, but by the end of his life he had fallen. We know that sin is judged against the light and knowledge held by the person concerned. There are many who knew less than David, and therefore would have been judged differently. But he appears, as far as we can see (which may not be so far), to have walked very closely with God.
How did he come to be so indifferent to the rights, or even the feelings of others? He desired a woman he saw, but did not know personally, so it was not love. It grew from hunger, not heart’s loneliness. He can have had no thought for her welfare, and still less for that of her husband, Uriah, who was a loyal soldier to David.
And in taking Bathsheba to wife (after he had caused Uriah to be killed) what of the loyalty of his own wife Micah, his friend Jonathan’s sister? Where were her feelings in this? Granted she was a woman of another time and culture than ours, and may not have expected the loyalty we do today, but she had risked her life to save David’s. She must have cared for him.
And later on, what of David’s daughter Tamar whose rape, by her brother, David connived at? And when she was raped, it was not the brother he punished, rather he threw her out into the streets in disgrace, a ruined and unwanted woman.
I cannot help but wonder where the gentleness of his heart was, his empathy. I would not wish him to be my husband, or father.
Saul, David and Solomon all began so well, and finished with tragedy. Well might we quote, ‘How are the mighty fallen’, even though it was not written to mean a fall of the spirit.
Whenever we think ourselves favoured of God, chosen above others, we run terrible risks of forgetting humility, of imagining that we are more important than others, that we have something that was not God-given, and therefore can not be God-taken-away should we abuse it, soil it, use it for our own ends, forget to be grateful, or imagine it is ours by right.
If our goodness is obedience rather than from the heart, it is like clothes we wear rather than the flesh and bones of who we are. Christ came to give us new commandments – not ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, but ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ – ‘feel this way’, and all righteous behaviour will follow. With prayers for sensitivity, time and thought to understand others, humility to listen, we will learn wisdom to know what helps another whose nature and whose path may not be the same as ours.
We have in ways been given even more than David, because we came after Christ. We have His teachings of mercy, purity of heart, human love one for another in the similitude of divine love. We have the knowledge of the atonement that excludes absolutely no human being, nothing that lives on the earth, or even the earth itself.
We are stewards of it all, and must return an accounting. When we say we love it – do we mean we wish it no harm – or do we mean we tend it, care for it, nurture it and wish to feed it, protect it from ill and see it attain its glory – all of it that we can?
That is a big thing to ask – but we are children of God – it cannot be too big for us. A step at a time towards the glory of eternity.
Walk with faith.