Working in restaurants in New York City is an education in much more than food service. I learned a great deal during my restaurant days from my fellow waiters and bartenders about, among many other things, acting, staging, film production, the recording industry, the freelance writer’s life. These glimpses into the artistic careers of my fellows came during what I came to think of as the nightly Service Bar Seminars. You see, usually, the evening shift in your average restaurant begins slowly. There’s a lull of 45 minutes or so after the dining room is set up and before the first customers arrive. There’s nothing really to do except hang out at the service bar, that space at the end or corner of the bar set aside for the waiters to get their drinks.
Hanging out at the service bar I heard all about the struggles of my friend Bruce in securing a record deal for his band. I learned a lot about the staging of opera from my friend Steve who worked itinerantly for City Opera as a stage manager. I learned a great deal about how to build a character using Stanislavsky’s method from countless actor friends.
My friend and fellow bartender Kim worked in film production and casting, and she would on occasion give us the benefit of her expertise in analyzing a recent film. She had high praise for a movie that came out in the 80s called “Married to the Mob.” Kim loved the production values in the movie, and the attention to detail. She especially loved one scene that takes place on a crowded New York City bus. “The got everything just right,” she said to me, “Down to the fact that someone on the bus is reading that book that you and everyone else in New York is reading right now, “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”
If
you lived in
Alice Miller died this week – and her obituary in the New York Times noted how influential she was in the field of child psychology. She was best known for her first book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” which was published in English in 1981 and, as the Times put it, caused a sensation, selling more than a million copies. Miller looked deeply and critically into the relationship of parents and children. She described much traditional childrearing as ‘poisonous pedagogy’. She was convinced that almost all adult dysfunction was attributable to the misuse of parental power and what she saw as abusive punishment. She was against corporal punishment, and all forms of childrearing that use force or emotional manipulation. The heightened awareness of child abuse in our society today and in the media and elsewhere during the past few decades is thanks in large part to Miller and her work. She was the tipping point; she caused those issues to come to the fore in our cultural consciousness.
The Times quotes Miller as saying in one of her essays, “Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured… believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.”
Beaten out of love. For those of us who endured a spanking or two, or in my case several, in their childhoods, that phrase may sound a little jarring. It may be a little uncomfortable to hear and to consider. Beaten out of love.
In our gospel today, for the first and only time in John’s Gospel, Jesus addresses his disciples as “little children.” He tells them, “I give you a new commandment. Love one another… Just as I have loved you.” Jesus’ new commandment shifts the emphasis of the commandment to love one another that we heard in our reading from Leviticus this morning. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” says the Lord God of Leviticus. Jesus’ commandment is slightly, but significantly, different. “Love one another” not as you love yourself, but “as I have loved you.” Jesus changes what is required of us; he ups the ante, doesn’t he? We are not to love one another as far as the limits of our human love allow, but we are to love one another as God has loved us. Jesus instructs us to love one another with the breadth and depth and constancy of the divine love that has been shown to us.
How does God love us? Just how broad and how deep and how unwavering is the love of God our Father for us, his ‘little children’? How far does God’s mercy extend? More than once – I’ve come across people who for one reason or another, are convinced that they have reached the limits of God’s love, that they have exceeded God’s capacity to forgive them. People who believe that God’s punishment is now or will soon be upon them. It is the saddest thing. And the reasons given, the unforgivable sin committed by these forsaken people is so often of the most innocuous kind or perhaps something completely attributable to our all-too-human nature.
The inability to honor a commitment to a spouse who has become addicted and abusive. Frustration with an aging, ailing parent. Frustration with an errant, troubled teenager. The failure to achieve the superhuman in parenting, the superhuman in providing for the family, the extraordinary in school, a 4.0 GPA and 2400 on the SATs.
In almost every case, when talking with these troubled folks, the unforgivable failure they fear they are guilty of is some sort of familial failure, some perceived fault or sin against a member of the family. And while they say they fear that they lost God’s love, that their sins are beyond God’s forgiveness, that they deserve the punishment God will surely visit upon them, I often wonder if it is not some human parent that they fear disappointing, some human parent whose wrath and punishment they fear. Is it not some flawed, failed human Father they see when they look to the Father God?
Maybe so, maybe we all do this a little bit. Perhaps we are subject to a poisonous pedagogy in our families. And perhaps that makes us expect to be beaten up or beaten down by God out of love, as we may have been by our parents.
We do sin, we do fail each other, we do fall short as parents, we fall short as children. We fall short as husbands and wives, as friends and lovers, we fall short as caretakers of the earth and its people, and we certainly fall short from time to time as constituent members of the Body of Christ in the world.
And in our gospel today, Jesus says he wants us to do better; to try to love one another with some semblance of the divine love shown to us. It sounds as if Jesus is expecting too much of us, but I think that, in fact, it is we who expect too little of God.
We can’t love others with anything like the divine love if we are unsure of the love God bears us, if we project our finite, human limitations onto the infinite God. I’ll take a page from Father Breiner’s sermon book here to assure you, God does love you and me, no matter what. And God’s love does not falter and does not fail, and God’s mercy extends beyond every sin, and every human failing. Now I’ll take a page from one of my own sermons, and say to you again that it is as the old hymn tells us, “The love of God is broader than the measure of the mind, and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind.” I last quoted from that hymn just a few weeks ago, in Lent. But it is an Easter message as much as a Lenten one.
You know, we’re not the first people to need to be reassured of the depth and breadth and surety of God’s love and mercy. It seems we’ve needed some sort of reassurance from the very beginning. It was the Apostle Paul who first sought to ensure us of the certainty of God’s love when he wrote to the Romans, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. When we know that, when we strive to make that love a real part of who we are, when we incarnate within us the infinite love of the incarnate God, then maybe we can begin to love one another as God intends us to do, maybe we can begin to love one another as God loves us.
But to love as God loves is a very tall order, it is a task that we will fail at more often than we will succeed, I expect. But when we do fail, we should not project that failure onto God. When we fail and falter in the love we show each other, we need not worry that God’s love for us fails or falters. Quite the opposite. When we fail and falter, it is then that God loves us all the more. ~ Amen+
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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