"Loving Kindness"

Yesterday one of my friends loaned me a book titled "Love Walked In" to read. Not having much else to do (besides reading about the role of Cod in the development of American Culture, or about Tchaikovsky's personality, or about SDR, or finishing Cryptonomicon from the summer), I dove in.

It's a great book; better than I expected (even given Katie's rave reviews.)

My favorite quote so far is the following:

"What she came to was that even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness. Cornelia had said that her father had ignored a child's cries for help. Even a man who would do this could be in love, with a love that mattered. Sitting upright in her living room, in a hundred-year-old chair, Clare trembled in the face of this truth she'd discovered all on her own, and she felt ancient and part of life."

I like the paragraph because it strikes at something that's really challenged me a lot - basically, validating everyone's humanity in the face of very human imperfections. In a lot of cases, it's easy to reduce situations to a question of what another person* "deserves" even though life isn't really about what we deserve, most of the time. A Protestant friend of mine talks about the idea of "total depravity" in which people are called to recognize that humanity is (get ready) - totally morally depraved, and it's only through the grace of God that we become saved.

Stay with me here. I used to really grate against this philosophy because it seemed to be not much more than an excuse for whatever behavior a person wanted to engage in - if we all have the same degree of "badness" and God saved me, then why do I need to try to be good? I realized that I was missing the point, though (I think...correct me if I'm wrong here) and that the philosophy is more the idea that in the face of this imperfection, there is some basis for universal human respect. Some would argue that this basis derives from God (or specifically the death/resurrection of Christ as a sacrifice for the good of humanity), but that's not entirely the point here...

I've been listening to a lot of Buddhist lectures recently, and they talk about the idea of cultivating "loving kindness" for everyone. Again, this is supposed to be the result of airgapping ego and situation, resulting in this sort of compassion that genuinely wants nothing more than for others to be happy just because they exist with an existence just as valid as our own. I think it's true that, regardless of how many awful things a person does, we only want to see them suffer as a result of our own (self-centered) emotional investment in a situation and not as a result of their inherent bad-ness. I'm not saying that it's unreasonable to have emotions, or that I'm anywhere close to letting go of mine...just that it's a comforting philosophy that seems to put ease and insight - and most importantly, ownership - into a lot of situations that might otherwise seem overwhelming.

At Mass tonight the homily was about humility. It's the same thing I've been talking about here...the idea is, again, that by putting ego on the back burner, we actually find ourselves in a much more joyful and loving - and free - position than we'd otherwise be. So many times people equate the Christian idea of "humility" with weakness and subservience, and self-loathing, but that's not supposed to be the case at all. I would argue that it actually takes a lot more confidence and self-acceptance to be humble than to be otherwise and that it's only this humility which lets us understand what the character above was referring to. I'm reminded of "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis here; he expressed what I'm trying to say much more eloquently.

Note that I'm also not arguing for continuing to stay in hurtful or abusive situations here. It's definitely a good thing to try and get away from resentment and hard feelings, and not to leave the past as a live mine buried somewhere. Compassion and partnership are two entirely different situations, though...(this distinction definitely breaks down as one becomes asymptotically close to universal mutual compassion but neither I nor humanity in general are anywhere close to that at this point...)

*Some people also tend to turn this sort of judgment inward, into a "I'm not good enough to ever truly be loved" attitude. I think that this is almost worse than attaching that judgment to others, because I do honestly believe that everyone innately "deserves" and "experiences" love but it's impossible to see that if you're denying it even for yourself. Surprisingly enough, usually dampening this inner critic in favor of some self-acceptance is all it takes to send someone well on his/her way to experiencing that "forbidden love" with another...