Short Days, Love and Nothing

This time of year, the sun is close to its lowest point. Even after the solstice it seems to linger low on the horizon (actually I think this is technically correct for reasons I can’t remember).

The New Testament also tells us the days are short, but from a different perspective

Paul says “The present form of the world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7.31). Why? Because its “form”, its collective human construction, or “imagined reality”, is undermined by the gospel of Christ. Paul didn’t have an anthropology of the victim or a science of mirror neurons to show how this might actually be happening. But he did have a direct awareness of the impact of Christ on humanity—as did all the primitive church, and that’s why he and they called Jesus “Lord”. They knew that something really was up with the Risen Jesus!

If there was a condemned and executed man declared innocent in living fact (empty tomb/appearances to individuals) —a man who had always enacted forgiveness while saying that the kind of God we got depended on the kind of God we gave out—then it meant all previous bets about both divinity and humanity were off. And if you believed this you also knew it. There was a totally new game in town.

That was back then. To think how that might affect us now we have to hit the scene-select much later, a much more contemporary understanding that takes into account the deep course and purpose of the gospel message over the space of 2000 years. For today, after those two millennia, there is a third sense to shortened days. Our time seems to be narrowing before our eyes because of the enormous pressure on the human earth…from increased population, but also increased desires, from the relentless media stream of images and the wants they prompt.

The effect of the pressure is both physical and mental. Slowly, we are herded closer and closer together, and there is less and less room to maneuver, to step aside and find an empty space. We’re like a pot of water on the stove. The heat is the human world itself and we are the molecules, more and more agitated, bouncing off each other, with no place to go but the next bounce…

Then suddenly, in precisely this situation we see the whole point of the shortened days, the increasing pressure of so many humans and their wants…it brings us to an entirely new human possibility, an entirely new way of being human, or in other terms a totally “new year”.

For a bounce doesn’t have to be a bounce. Being brought in close proximity to the other does not have to mean conflict. It could equally well mean forgiveness and peace and community. And this is so because with the gospel there really is a new human physics, one that has as little to do with violence as time travel would have to do with road travel. There is now finally at the eleventh hour a new science of human particles to learn, a new anthropology, a new humanity. It has always been there, of course, but now with the pressure of the pot it appears more and more as the one remaining human possibility. As W.H. Auden said on the eve of WW2, "We must love one another or die".

But at once the objection comes: love seems so tenuous, so helpless, how can it possibly stand against human violence? And it is that objection which brings me to the real point of the blog. I first started thinking not about short days as such but about love, and its real existence. And it was its existence that struck me forcibly, so then I worked back to how urgent love has become in the moment of violent pressure.

For yes, love exists! But love is relational and so essentially invisible. It cannot be seen or observed. I have a friend who’s always talking about vortices and energy lines and powers in the earth. He believes what’s good and holy is located somehow physically in the world, in rocks, and rivers. I am not adverse to the thrill of certain special places and their feeling and associations, but the thing about love is that it is a new physics. You’ll never see an energy line for love, a blip on a screen or the flicker of a meter. No doubt we can see its effects in the physical world, but in its own moment, its actual existence as love, it is absolutely new and different. The closest it could be recognized would be as a vanishing trace, the signal of something that passed this way but we missed it as it passed.

And the reason for that is because love gives itself as a nothing, into the nothing. If it were to give itself as a some-thing then it would not be love, but an exchange, a something demanding something in return. (Even Christmas gifts for all their attraction have some of this, we give and expect gifts. Love expects nothing in return.)

But then—and this is the enormously cool thing—the moment that love passes by in the world, in the actions of people, it sets up a secret attraction, because at a level too deep for words, too deep for anything, we find life exactly in this. There is a level in us moved precisely by no-thing, by love. And it is this level that more than any-thing proves we are meant for more than the present order of things, the present world and its imagined reality. We are meant rather for an endless world of endless loving, of giving the self away as if it were no-thing.

So may the days be short and ever shorter, so the new day of love can begin!