The erotic foundations of Love

This month we are talking about love over on the Spirtual Formation and Leadership blog.

Love is a many splendored thing, so the crooners tell us. We are familiar with the Greek thoughts on the subject, three classifications: Eros, Phileo and Agape. Agape is the unconditional perfect Love of God. Phileo we know as the brotherly love, the best Peter could muster when Jesus asked if Peter loved him. Eros has a dirty, unacceptable quality in our minds equal in essence to lust. I submit that this descending valuation of love isn’t true to the God who is love, nor perfectly helpful to our spiritual formation.

Union and Communion

The Union and Communion by J. Hudson Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a surprisingly mystical work from the founder of the China Inland Mission. I found it passionately written. Taylor takes a look at the Song of Solomon through the eyes of a Christian Mystic. He identifies with the bride enraptured in her bridegroom, sick with love. In her he finds the dramatic experience of the believer, at one time caught up in union with Christ, at another feeling the pain of separation because of her own heart "prone to wander."

Taylor also betrays a glimpse of his own soul. This hero of modern missions has the heart of a mystic - not one caught up in the navel-gazing which causes many to impugn the mystics, but one whose ardent love for his Beloved stirs him to action.

When she is separated from him for the second time, the bride tells the daughters of Jerusalem how lovely he is, her heart inflamed and faint with love, growing more so as she tells it. (SS 5:9-16)

The LION of the tribe of Judah is to His own bride the KING of love; and, with full heart and beaming face, she so recounts His beauties that the daughters of Jerusalem are seized with strong desire to seek Him with her that they also may behold His beauty.

This is why Hudson Taylor went to China! His heart was so full of his savior's beauty that he had to share it. In comparing the church to the bride of Solomon, he also declares that this is the experience of every Christian, to be so wholly in love with Christ that mission flows from the heart like honey from the comb.

View all my reviews

Transparency and vulnerability

What discipline is required for the future leader to overcome the temptation of individual heroism? I would like to propose the discipline of confession and forgiveness. Just as the future leaders must be mystics deeply steeped in contemplative prayer, so also they must be persons always willing to confess their own brokenness and ask for forgiveness from those to whom they minister.

Vulnerability and transparency can help keep me from the temptation to be spectacular. I need to take my journaling in the form of this blog more seriously. It is a discipline that puts myself out there for comment. That isn't always easy but it is humbling.

Henri Nouwen - "In The Name of Jesus"

Yesterday I received some materials for my master's course. One was this amazing little book. I read it in one sitting, so the truths about Christian leadership are resonating in me right now with a multitude of harmonics. It will take some time for me to fully appreciate the melody. There is one note, perhaps a chord, that is really sticking with me tonight.

Nouwen cites one temptation to Christian leaders as being relevance. Relevance is certainly a word we hear a lot about these days, so my interest was piqued. He takes relevance out of its buzz context and talks about our personal desire to feel relevant - to feel that we have something to offer.

I recognize how I often feel small when my perceived relevance isn't having any real impact (that's not really very relevant is it.) Nouwen declares that I can give up this worry. To the world, I am completely irrelevant. That is how it should be. That is not to say that the Church or the gospel should be irrelevant. But I am irrelevant. Anything I have in myself in no way useful to the world. I must rely on God. Nouwen give a powerful weapon to dismantle our habit to seek relevance: contemplative prayer. O how I love this! This is why I long to identify with the Christian Mystics of old. O to only love Christ, and focus all through that lens!

I have been dealing a lot lately with discussions of politics, both church and state. I am trying to hold on to my Love in all these. In that spirit I keep longing for a less pragmatic stance by my brothers in Christ. I feel affirmed and challenged by these words:

"Christian leaders cannot simply be persons who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for all their words, advice, and guidance. Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love to find there the wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them. Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses with out being manipulative.

"For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required."