By the Way: Love is acceptance with accountability
By Medicine Hat News on January 26, 2019.
You have perhaps heard the following: “God loves you just the way you are; but He loves you too much to let you stay that way.” I think both parts of this statement are important. They seem to be a nice balance that keeps the concept of love intact. To lose either focus is to risk making love a perversion, to subtly twist or change it into its opposite. Without the first part, love becomes manipulation, a guilt trip, something to be earned, a reward or favour. Without the second, love becomes ineffective. Instead of being the greatest creative power, the most effective agent of change in the universe, it becomes a sentimental whitewash of what is, a justification of the unjust. The key to most things in life is balance, since we seem by nature to gravitate toward extremes. It seems to me that our current society has embodied this first component of love — that of unconditional acceptance. Whether we truly believe it, or live it, we at least have the cultural rhetoric down pat. I am less confident that we have done justice to the second quality of love — that of expecting and asking others to grow and change. When this second piece is missing, love is reduced to being an act of enabling. I realize this is a complex process and the motivations can be “good,” but the end result is that, by taking away their accountability, enabling allows the other to continue in a self-destructive behaviour. This is hardly a loving thing to do. Enabling takes the form of “helping” the other; and seems to be motivated by the virtues of not judging and accepting (loving) others as they are. But, enabling functions to keep the person in their disease, and, by sheltering them from the consequences of their choices, effectively short circuits the process whereby they may be brought to seek change, healing, growth. If acceptance without accountability (enabling) is not loving, neither is a pious indifference to the plight of others (the sort of “pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps” ethic) loving. As I said, the key is balance. Where are we as a Canadian society, as a Western culture, as a community? Balanced? Leaning towards enabling those in our society that struggle with self-destructive choices and lifestyles? Or, are we judgmental and critical, preferring indifference and noninvolvement? When love became a person, and shared completely our human condition, he taught and modelled this balanced approach: Love is acceptance with accountability — the greatest affirmation of human dignity! This looked different when he interacted with the powerful and entitled than it did in his interactions with the powerless. One example nicely illustrates this: When asked to condemn a woman who was caught red-handed in her sin, the penalty for which was death by stoning, Jesus first asked those in power who were faultless to “throw the first stone.” Then, when they, convicted by their own accountability, left the woman with Jesus, he said to her: “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.” Is this way, the Way of Love, a path that we can walk as Christians, as Hatters, as Canadians? Rev. Oz.Lorentzen is from St. Barnabas Anglican Church. 7-6
