I like Dallas Willard’s definition of love: to will the good of the other. All compassion is love, but not all love is compassion. Compassion is a loving response to someone else’s suffering. Love wills the good of the other, even when there is no suffering. The moral knowledge exists about the origin and source of love.
In the human sphere, we see two types of love and compassion, ordinary and exceptional. Ordinary love is willing the good of someone we care about. It appears that all humans possess ordinary love. Even bad guys appear to love their family or friends. Didn’t Tony Soprano love his family? This is a good thing, but it is ordinary. Since God’s love extends to all, it is like everybody is God’s friend or in his family. In his kingdom, compassion is always an appropriate response to suffering, regardless of who it is. That’s God, however; it is a bit different with us humans. We have a much smaller network.
Our expressions of love and compassion become exceptional when they are extended to those outside of our network of family and friends. This type of love does not appear to be as universal, and few of us have mastered it. It’s just not natural or easy to come by. We can go to the source and try and figure out how to get some of it transferred. I see one big impediment to this project, however: attitude.
What role should our attitude play in compassion? Let’s take an example. If we saw a stranger in distress, a kingdom response would be to help. In principle, we may be willing to go along with this. Add this detail to the example: the person is a convicted rapist. Should this additional information make a difference in the right thing to do? I give this extreme example as a way of pushing the issue. Examples could range across the entire continuum, but the issue remains: what role does our attitude have in our expressions of exceptional love and mercy? Is it better to not know too many details? Is it better to feed the homeless and not ask any questions? Should it affect our response if we do know the details of the situation?
Help me our here.
3 comments:
Mark, here's my two cents. You did a great job of defining the difference in compassion vs. love and ordinary vs. exceptional. And you are asking an excellent question. But I still think we easily lose our way when we use the word "love." More and more, our culture confuses love and sentimentality. For instance, which is more loving: To tell your adult alcoholic child that you will accept him no matter his behaivor, or to tell him his behavior needs to change - that it must change or else there will be consequences?
I know you are more concerned about our attitude toward the outcast (what is happening in our hearts), but your questions at the end concern what our expression of love looks like in practical terms.
Does the most loving choice always produce good feelings between the lover and the one being shown love? Because my deceitful heart really wants people to like me, and I think that has caused me to fail to love like God loves sometimes. God, on the other hand, doesn't seem too concerned with our feelings about the way he loves us.
Attitude; a complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun"
What factors determine our attitude? What happens when we are wrestling with our own attitude? For instance, what would make someone internally conflicted about how to respond to suffering? What can we practice to prevent the conflict? Would wisdom be the result? Wisdom is much like experience and it is diffucult to learn from a book.
Keith
Love is love, the other things are not. Being a push over so that someone likes you is no more love than being a hard ass thinking it is tough love. I have no interest in either. Seems those are driven more by ego and self. The difficult thing is doing whatever, weather it is holding somebody or telling the truth to someone, with an attitude where we truly will the good of the other. I don't think that is an easy or natural thing to do.
Being judgmental is a problem. Jesus seemed to love the sinner but speak the truth to them. Sometimes we want to "speak the truth" more out of defense of our own perceived "rightness." In those cases, we need to drop that self-rightness and focus on that that is primary - learning how to love.
I was glad I got a chance to see Dennis love Dudley the other night. He held him as he cried like a scared, hurting child. Dudley was drunk. What he needed at that moment was to calm down and go to bed, which is what Dennis did. The alcohol was a problem and Dennis gently pointed that out. More on this later, since his drinking is the type of information, among many other things, that is likley to cause us to change our response. Should it? If we didn't know it, we have compassion, but when we learn that, should our compassion change?
That's the point I am trying to get at. I want to learn how to love rightly.
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