The demands of love

When we are responsible, we have to care about others. Steven Garber wrote:

They are people who "get it" – as in, I wonder why she doesn't "get it." Or, he "gets it," doesn't he? There is something about heart and mind together in that assessment. They are people who are more than smart, because they understand that it is possible to get all A's and still flunk life. In biblical imagery, they are people with ears that hear, and eyes that see. They are people who know that to know – in a deeply biblical sense – means to be responsible, and that to be responsible means to care.

This caring is "difficult, demanding and dangerous," as Nick Shere wrote:

We may need to kill, but – ironic though it sounds – if we kill, we must kill with love, kindness, care and sorrow. And we must never, ever look upon the life of another with hatred or without compassion. Love is not easy, safe or simple. It is difficult, demanding and dangerous. To love is to surrender safety, and safety, just now, is very precious indeed. But this danger does not make love any less necessary, and I would say the risk of becoming what we hate is a far greater one then the risk of universal love.

It is neither guaranteed to us nor is it something we can choose at will. It is "a fundamental condition of our lives" that can increase or decrease, that can be gained or lost, but that we must contend with. Greg Epstein:

Love is not just some voluntary, extracurricular activity that we can pick up and put down when we please. And it's not some set or fixed biological reality totally predetermined by our genes to make us miserable or blissful, or both at the same time. The degree to which we have love is a fundamental condition of our lives, like the degree to which we have housing, clothing, money, education, or access to crude oil fields.

Just like any of the other fundamental conditions of life, if we don't have love, we may be able to get it with hard work – and if we do have it, we shouldn't get too haughty about it, because we can lose it at any moment.

Love is not essentially or always self-sacrificial, but it may be called upon to sacrifice. Wendell Berry wrote: "Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded." Ford Madox Ford wrote: "I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn’t. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted." Thus, Elizabeth Gilbert: “...every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”

Sources

"To See What You See: On Liturgy & Learning & Life." Steven Garber. Printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 10.

Nick Shere, "Love must guide us on our path to justice and action," Brown Daily Herald, Monday, September 24, 2001.

Greg Epstein. Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. William Morrow, 2009. p. 81.

Wendell Berry. "Word and Flesh" in What are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. p. 200. Quoted in "A Wedding Sermon for Nathan and Sandie" by Steven Garber, printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 119.

Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. Originally 1915. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. p 80.

Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. New York: Viking, 2010. p. 5.

Evil is the shadow: Spotting evil within us and without

When we do not recognize evil as our own shadow and see it only as an external enemy, we cannot defeat it. It grows within us. James Weldon Johnson said, "We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms."

Sometimes we present evil as complex, yet still mostly external to ourselves, as Barry Holstun Lopez wrote of the wolf:

The human mind entertains itself with such symbols and metaphors, sorting out the universe in an internal monologue, and I think it delights in wolves. The wolf is a sometime symbol of evil, and the mind dotes on distinctions between good and evil. He is a symbol of the warrior, and we are privately concerned with our own courage and nobility. The wolf's is also a terrifying image, and the human mind likes to frighten itself.

That evil is in ourselves, too, is probably one reason why self-sacrifice seems to be an effective form of transformation. When we allow ourselves, as M. Scott Peck put it, "to be pierced by the evil of others," we may "survive and not succumb." Their evil kills our evil. By identifying it in them and letting it in, we identify it in ourselves and let it out. Peck:

The healing of evil – scientifically or otherwise – can be accomplished only by the love of individuals. A willing sacrifice is required. The individual healer must allow his or her own soul to become the battleground. He or she must sacrificially absorb the evil.

Then what prevents the destruction of that soul? If one takes the evil itself into one's heart, like a spear, how can one's goodness still survive? Even if the evil is vanquished thereby, will not the good be also? What will have been achieved beyond some meaningless trade-off?

I cannot answer this in language other than mystical. I can say only that there is a mysterious alchemy whereby the victim becomes the victor. As C. S. Lewis wrote: "When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

I do not know how this occurs. But I know that it does. I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others – to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken – to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world.

James Densley, interviewed in 2022:

If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

Sources

Author and activist James Weldon Johnson, quoted in The Wall Street Journal. The Week, March 21, 2014. p. 17.

Barry Holstun Lopez. Of Wolves and Men. New York, Simon and Shuster, 1978; first Touchstone edition, 1995. p 226.

M. Scott Peck, M.D. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. (1983) New York: Touchstone, 1998. p. 269. Quoting C. S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Collier/Macmillan, 1970), p. 160.

"Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?" Melanie Warner, interviewing Jillian Peterson and James Densley. Politico. May 27, 2022.

What a 'Mockingjay' gives up: Sacrifice in the 'Hunger Games' trilogy

"The Hunger Games," a fantasy trilogy written by Suzanne Collins, begins with the sacrifice of children. The heroine also learns the meaning of voluntary sacrifice.

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 30, 2013.

"The Hunger Games," a fantasy trilogy written by Suzanne Collins, begins with the sacrifice of a couple dozen children. With varying levels of training as fighters, they are dumped into an arena with instructions to kill each other. The last one standing will “win.” It is part of their cultural expectation growing up, as the state reenacts the games annually: different year, different children chosen by lottery to be sacrificed. Some families whose children are not selected nevertheless prove themselves actively willing to risk the sacrifice; they agree to enter their children’s names multiple times in the lottery in exchange for extra food rations.

In the first book, "The Hunger Games," the heroine and narrator, Katniss, enters the arena on the premise of an additional, deliberate sacrifice: her sister has been selected in the lottery, and she offers to take her sister’s place. Once in the arena, Katniss must kill people whom she would, in other circumstances, have nothing personal against. This moral concession to circumstances is another sacrifice for her. She must form alliances with people she does not especially like, and in particular, she discovers that she must spark a romance (at least for the audience’s benefit) to stay alive. The boy truly falls in love with her, and at one point, he drops his weapon, signaling his willingness to be killed rather than to kill her, as only one of them is allowed to win. The moment at which the Games end hinges on their own threatened ultimate sacrifice that goes a step beyond this gesture of surrender.

It is no surprise that Katniss survives the Hunger Games (else, how could she narrate the story?). In the second book, "Catching Fire," she is forced to persist with the illusion of a romance, and she must enter the arena to fight again. Every detail of her life and death seems controlled by the state. Yet there are some positive aspects to these sacrifices. One individual follows her example, volunteering to take another’s place in the arena. Katniss herself decides that resolving to keep another person alive in the arena and giving up hope of her own survival is a worthwhile sacrifice that will give her something meaningful to fight for. She even gives up the opportunity to run away with someone who is interested in her, as his elopement plans do not include the rescue of anyone else Katniss cares about.

In the third book, "Mockingjay," Katniss’s ideals enlarge. Her life is no longer defined by the possibility that she might sacrifice herself for only one person, and she no longer assumes that the existing political order is an eternal given. She grows to be an icon as well as an active fighter in a movement to overthrow the tyrannical government. To be good soldiers, she and her comrades often think of themselves as willing to sacrifice themselves for each other, but this is primarily a mental strategy that keeps their task psychologically manageable and that reinforces their loyalty to each other. They are actually fighting with the possibility that they could sacrifice themselves for the cause. They don’t want just to survive the Hunger Games or to avoid the wrath of the ruler. They want to live in a world where everyone is free from the fear of cruelty and tyranny.

At times, Katniss is frustrated with belonging to the human race, since, as she puts it, “something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences.” This is sacrifice of a negative kind: the sacrifice of victims who do not consent. On her journey, however, Katniss also learns about voluntary sacrifices and makes many of her own. She learns that the full meaning of giving up a person to the enemy’s calculated plans or to the ravages of war depends on how much she cares about that person and how much she feels she owes them. She learns, furthermore, that taking on the responsibility of serving as the symbol of a rebellion – the "Mockingjay" – means letting go of most of one's private concerns and beginning to make choices for the welfare of a nation.