Being Present

1 John 4

I want to unpack an aphorism of mine--
To love someone is to be with them in such a way that they feel the presence of God.

First, I do not mean that we are godlike in our presence with other human beings. We are not holy in and of ourselves--no, we remain fully human in whatever context we find ourselves; i.e., we bring all our mess along with all our gifts into any meeting with anyone at any given time.

So what do I mean?

My thinking flows from that of the Apostle John when he wrote--"No one has ever seen God, but when we love one another, God is in us and God's love perfected through us."

What does that mean?

It means rethinking how glibly we approach love. Love means we are stepping beyond ourselves and entering a circle in which we will lost ourselves. We will lower our boundaries. We will risk exposing ourselves to another person. We will risk revealing what really and truly moves us, inspires us, and means something to us.

Supposedly, the person about whom we feel this most deeply becomes our spouse--the person with whom we will share the entirety of our lives, with whom we will ascend our hopes and dreams, and with whom we will walk the valleys when those hopes and dreams crash. Supposedly, our families become the havens in which we can be this real and actual. We laugh, saying home is where it's disgusting (as Garfield the cat once noted)! Everyone scratches where it itches!

But those "supposedly" moments sometimes fail to meet expectations or hopes. Homes can be harmful. Families can hurt one another deeply and without care, assuming these people just have to take it. Families can hurt one another deeply as what is revealed is real enough, but also dysfunctional. As the veils drop, what gets revealed is addiction, hurtful neurosis, and so on. The front door closes on a morass of human frailty. Marriages can become anything but partnerships, instead unraveling into power plays and hierarchies. They can devolve into cold meetings of strangers when no one speaks and no one feels they know the other any longer. Eyes stray and hearts run to alternatives. That hurts. A lot.

To love as the apostle counsels means taking on the hard work of feeding love, nourishing it into health, and constantly working to strengthen the bonds. It is like the need to care for infrastructure. If we ignore the bridges and roads we use every day, they will wear out, and we invite a catastrophe. Last spring, a bridge crossing a Washington river on I-5 collapsed--thanks be to God no one got hurt--but it fell because everyone took it for granted. In our relationships, we can slide into taking each other for granted--shoot, we're married now, there's nothing left to do--she's mine for life; he's mine to eternity! As long as we sit in matching Barca-loungers, all shall be well! It does not work that way. To do so is to invite a collapse as momentous as an interstate bridge failure.

So how do we feed love?

Be present in such a way that God is present. God is present in love that is other-centered and self-sacrificial. To be other-centered is to think of another's needs first, to seek to listen first rather than speaking, and to consider the impact of your words and actions on the other person before saying or doing anything. It is awareness of the other's reality all the time. It works like this in a simple, daily occurrence--a man gets home a little bit before his wife from work. He begins to relax, flipping through his emails, when she arrives. Seeing her come through the door, he immediately sees that she is especially weary. She looks bedraggled and befuddled. So he asks, "How was your day?" with the intent of listening to every word she says, not interrupting, and taking in the fullness of her experience. That is meeting someone in an other-centered way. Moving on, we assume we know what self-sacrifice is. As God expresses it in and of himself, self-sacrifice is doing whatever it takes to bring another to fullness and fruition. Flowing from being other-centered, it means setting aside our wants to meet another's needs. It means meeting another in compassion to be sure they will be well. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan to fully explain God's definition of self-sacrifice--a stranger gives all that he can to make a total stranger well, taking on the risks that the man might not really be hurt, setting aside any plans he had to make caring for the wounded man top priority, and being willing to cover any and all expenses to cover the man's recovery. Okay--in our lives and world, such a stance may look like this--having listened to his wife's tale of woe and weariness, the man now decides to forego whatever he planned to care for her. He had planned dinner, but he trashes that plan and asks what she wants that night, and does it, even if it means rousing himself to get dressed up and go to some special Chez Cuisine. She was going to take care of bills that needed to be paid that night, so he volunteers to take care of them after dinner. She loves to have her feet rubbed, so he rubs them for an hour as they watch her favorite DVD, a movie he (secretly) cannot stand, but she needs the escape, so be it. To some, this may not seem terribly "sacrificial," but it is--he sets aside all he might want to care for her.

Now look at my little scenario. Love moves it. The one cared for will know she is cared for. The one loving will find that because he does all this out of love, it feels pretty good and he feels like he is really doing the right thing. Both will be fuller than otherwise. God is present. As they love one another, they will feel their love strengthened and empowered by that presence.

Bringing the presence of God into our relationships is not as difficult as we make it, nor does God seek it to be a heroic act to be with us. God loves us. God loves us fully and completely. God wants to remove hindrances to our awareness of God with us, not build them up.

So to love someone is to bring the presence of God to them. We bring that presence as we meet them with the eyes, mind, and heart of God. We do that as we meet them centering on them and being willing to do all that is needed to care for them in compassion.