Every morning I’ve been doing a practice near the beginning of my morning prayers when I pray to become ‘centered’ on agape. This practice began as I used Romans 5:5 to start. I pray: May “God’s agape pour into the center of my being thru the Holy Spirit.” That prayer helps me let God’s agape open me to access God’s Presence.
What such a prayer practice means to me is
[1st] accepting agape-flow into 'the center of my being' (in ancient Greek, ‘the heart’);
[2nd] meditating on the way agape opens me to the Presence of the Holy Spirit over me, under me, around me, and thru me -- as I open to both the intimacy and the vastness of Presence.
I’ve found this to be very helpful for my spiritual development. Thru that practice I’ve slowly been able to ‘sense’ Presence permeating my being and in the next moment I ‘sense’ a deep, vast silence. As I wait upon that ‘deep, vast silence’ I gain a sense of divine Presence throughout that ‘silence’ -- in that way it’s not silence in the normal meaning of that word -- in the same way this practice has led me to realize that agape is not love in the normal meaning of that word. Then as God's agape opens me to the vastness of silent Presence, I 'sense' the spiritual connection that agape gives me with God.
Now, of course that is just the beginning of the wonder that agape brings to me. Thru that practice I have found deeper insight into Paul's conclusion that agape brings patience and kindness [1 Cor. 13: 4]. Of course, I call it “just the beginning” because I have become more sensitive to how very far I am from fully accepting agape’s patience and kindness into the everyday actions of my daily life.
I guess the most common example of my lack of progress is the way I lose patience with my grandson when he gets on my nerves and frustrates me. The need to keep working on gaining patience to handle such frustrations is one of the reasons why I talk about centering my life on agape.
It is not enough to center on agape in the moment of deep prayer, accepting God’s agape pouring into the center of one’s being; but also it’s necessary to center one’s life in God’s agape. That's needed in order for agape to work in the daily relationships and the daily times of need and struggle. That’s how we find the strength, patience, kindness, and joy of God’s agape flowing into action in our living.
But it is exactly in finding such effectiveness of agape’s help that we find our closeness to God’s Presence.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
The Mistake of calling AGAPE ‘Love’
There are two major problems with translating spiritual ‘agape’ with the ordinary English word ‘love.’ So far in this blog I’ve only focused on the first -- that is, because Paul purposely chose not to use the ordinary Greek word for love, his meaning is corrupted if we translate what he wrote with our ordinary word for love.
Of course, a few centuries ago, translators tried using words like ‘charity’ and ‘loving-kindness.’ But neither of those words carries the spiritual meaning that Paul gave to agape when he referred to 'God's agape.' We can never begin to see what Paul was meaning without the sense of spiritual.
The second major problem is much, much worse. It happens when ‘love’ gets wrongly used to imagine God in our image. That happens when we think that God loves just like humans love.
And that is the problem with applying our ordinary word for love to divine action. All kinds of wrongful thinking comes from doing that. For example, in popularized religious groups, God is expected to love us in the ordinary way that humans love each other. That pushes them to fall into the mistake of pseudo-religious thinking that God is somehow a "super-powerful Man-in-the-clouds" who has to always protect us when we strictly follow a bunch of rules and regulations.
Such a mistaken image of God pictures this Being-up-in-the-clouds showering down love into us like rain. That’s why popularized pseudo-religion has set up a false system of rewards and punishments. Of course, that has led to the unfortunate state of affairs causing untold numbers of people to ‘lose their faith’ -- because life just doesn't work that way.
But of course, that is not at all what Jesus meant. In the Greek translation we see that clearly when a spiritual form of agape is used instead of ever using the Greek word for love (eros, philia, storge) applied to God.
Of course, where that truth stands out so starkly is when we finally get to 1 John 4:8. No First-Century Christian would have ever said, “God is eros;” or “God is philia.” That would have been turning God into human love. Something very different was meant when that verse proclaimed that "God is agape." But in the modern world that tragic error can be made when ‘agape’ is translated as ‘love.’
But we can gain better insight by quoting 1 John 4:7-12 -- leaving in agape, agapeo, and agapan where they were meant to be -- “Dear friends, let’s agapeo each other, because agape is from God, and everyone who agapeo is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t agapeo does not know God, because God is agape. This is how the agape of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is agape: it is not that we agapeo God but that God agapan us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God agapan us this way, we also ought to agapeo each other. No one has ever seen God. If we have agape for each other, God remains in us and God’s agape is made perfect in us.” (Common English Bible)
So we can see, that during the developing process of spiritual understanding in the Early Church in the first century, Christians had transformed agape into a deeply spiritual term. Of course, we today lose all that important spiritual transformation when we make the mistake of reversing that critical religious process by translating ‘agape’ as ‘love.’ Those verses in 1 John 4:7-12 have so much deeper meaning when the forms of ‘agape’ are left in -- where they were meant to be originally.
Of course, a few centuries ago, translators tried using words like ‘charity’ and ‘loving-kindness.’ But neither of those words carries the spiritual meaning that Paul gave to agape when he referred to 'God's agape.' We can never begin to see what Paul was meaning without the sense of spiritual.
The second major problem is much, much worse. It happens when ‘love’ gets wrongly used to imagine God in our image. That happens when we think that God loves just like humans love.
And that is the problem with applying our ordinary word for love to divine action. All kinds of wrongful thinking comes from doing that. For example, in popularized religious groups, God is expected to love us in the ordinary way that humans love each other. That pushes them to fall into the mistake of pseudo-religious thinking that God is somehow a "super-powerful Man-in-the-clouds" who has to always protect us when we strictly follow a bunch of rules and regulations.
Such a mistaken image of God pictures this Being-up-in-the-clouds showering down love into us like rain. That’s why popularized pseudo-religion has set up a false system of rewards and punishments. Of course, that has led to the unfortunate state of affairs causing untold numbers of people to ‘lose their faith’ -- because life just doesn't work that way.
But of course, that is not at all what Jesus meant. In the Greek translation we see that clearly when a spiritual form of agape is used instead of ever using the Greek word for love (eros, philia, storge) applied to God.
Of course, where that truth stands out so starkly is when we finally get to 1 John 4:8. No First-Century Christian would have ever said, “God is eros;” or “God is philia.” That would have been turning God into human love. Something very different was meant when that verse proclaimed that "God is agape." But in the modern world that tragic error can be made when ‘agape’ is translated as ‘love.’
But we can gain better insight by quoting 1 John 4:7-12 -- leaving in agape, agapeo, and agapan where they were meant to be -- “Dear friends, let’s agapeo each other, because agape is from God, and everyone who agapeo is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t agapeo does not know God, because God is agape. This is how the agape of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is agape: it is not that we agapeo God but that God agapan us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God agapan us this way, we also ought to agapeo each other. No one has ever seen God. If we have agape for each other, God remains in us and God’s agape is made perfect in us.” (Common English Bible)
So we can see, that during the developing process of spiritual understanding in the Early Church in the first century, Christians had transformed agape into a deeply spiritual term. Of course, we today lose all that important spiritual transformation when we make the mistake of reversing that critical religious process by translating ‘agape’ as ‘love.’ Those verses in 1 John 4:7-12 have so much deeper meaning when the forms of ‘agape’ are left in -- where they were meant to be originally.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Agape and Kindness
In my May 16 posting I compared the most important scripture passages that gave spiritual meaning to agape. Starting with Paul’s teaching about agape in Rom. 5:5, 8:35-39, and 12:9-21; I compared them with 1 Cor. 13 and Gal. 5:14; and then with the 2 Great Commandments in Mat. 22:36-40 and the extension from that in Mat. 5:44-45; and the conclusion in 1 Jn. 4:9-12.
Not only was that spiritual teaching, but it was also practical advice. In Romans 12:2-21 Paul gave practical results from letting God’s agape fill our daily living. He said it can help us “be patient in affliction, be faithful in prayer.” The next verse may be what led the earliest French translators to use “charity” to translate “agape” -- “Share with God’s people; extend hospitality to strangers.” Then he talked about not being conceited or proud, but living in harmony and peace with everyone, even to the point of blessing those who persecute you.
To show that a complete transformation happens when living by God’s agape, Paul ended by talking about not repaying evil for evil, and not taking revenge. Of course, he learned what a radical change in human perspective happens because God then makes it possible to show agape even to enemies. Paul wrote: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.” He circled back to the beginning of this section by saying: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
All of this unusual teaching is what has led modern writers to conclude by defining God’s agape with words similar to Rollo May’s when he defined it as “the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it” or as “selfless giving.” [Love and Will, p. 319] Obviously, such action does not come about by just blindly following along where society tells us we must go.
For those people today who are not sure how to know if God’s agape is truly active in their lives, I refer to what Paul described in Romans. So if you are not living the way he described -- by being kind, compassionate, and charitable with everyone around you, but instead you want to take revenge against enemies and overcome evil with evil (such as using warfare to try solving problems, either in your community or around the world) -- then you can know that God’s agape is not transforming you as should be happening. And of course, both Jesus and Paul warned that it is not easy to live by God’s agape. The pressure to conform to the pattern of the world is very strong.
That's why people in every civilization on the planet are falsely indoctrinated to think there is nothing evil about taking revenge against enemies. That has been the sad state of affairs for thousands of years. But Jesus came to bring us the power to change all that. If we don’t put the spiritual power of agape to work, then Jesus died in vain. It is up to each of us.
That’s what I found when I started with the first place ‘agape’ appears in Romans (5:5), then followed Paul’s thinking right on through to the way God’s agape fulfills our lives -- God’s agape as a spiritual power that flows into us and through us when we open up to the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our relationships with others. Paul implies that such is the way God’s agape makes us “be aglow with the Spirit” and “be joyful in hope” as we “serve the Lord” through LIVING by God’s agape. By truly living this way, the Holy Spirit uses agape to transform us through the renewal of our minds. That transformation brings us the ability to keep from being conformed to the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of the human world.
It is God's agape that gives us the strength to be able to be transformed to live the non-violent lifestyle that Paul pointed out was basic to being Christian. And we can take heart because God’s spiritual power in our lives is stronger than the pressure of the world. That is the hope talked about by Paul (Romans 5:4-5). That is the hope upon which the whole future of the human race hinges.
Not only was that spiritual teaching, but it was also practical advice. In Romans 12:2-21 Paul gave practical results from letting God’s agape fill our daily living. He said it can help us “be patient in affliction, be faithful in prayer.” The next verse may be what led the earliest French translators to use “charity” to translate “agape” -- “Share with God’s people; extend hospitality to strangers.” Then he talked about not being conceited or proud, but living in harmony and peace with everyone, even to the point of blessing those who persecute you.
To show that a complete transformation happens when living by God’s agape, Paul ended by talking about not repaying evil for evil, and not taking revenge. Of course, he learned what a radical change in human perspective happens because God then makes it possible to show agape even to enemies. Paul wrote: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.” He circled back to the beginning of this section by saying: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
All of this unusual teaching is what has led modern writers to conclude by defining God’s agape with words similar to Rollo May’s when he defined it as “the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it” or as “selfless giving.” [Love and Will, p. 319] Obviously, such action does not come about by just blindly following along where society tells us we must go.
For those people today who are not sure how to know if God’s agape is truly active in their lives, I refer to what Paul described in Romans. So if you are not living the way he described -- by being kind, compassionate, and charitable with everyone around you, but instead you want to take revenge against enemies and overcome evil with evil (such as using warfare to try solving problems, either in your community or around the world) -- then you can know that God’s agape is not transforming you as should be happening. And of course, both Jesus and Paul warned that it is not easy to live by God’s agape. The pressure to conform to the pattern of the world is very strong.
That's why people in every civilization on the planet are falsely indoctrinated to think there is nothing evil about taking revenge against enemies. That has been the sad state of affairs for thousands of years. But Jesus came to bring us the power to change all that. If we don’t put the spiritual power of agape to work, then Jesus died in vain. It is up to each of us.
That’s what I found when I started with the first place ‘agape’ appears in Romans (5:5), then followed Paul’s thinking right on through to the way God’s agape fulfills our lives -- God’s agape as a spiritual power that flows into us and through us when we open up to the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our relationships with others. Paul implies that such is the way God’s agape makes us “be aglow with the Spirit” and “be joyful in hope” as we “serve the Lord” through LIVING by God’s agape. By truly living this way, the Holy Spirit uses agape to transform us through the renewal of our minds. That transformation brings us the ability to keep from being conformed to the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of the human world.
It is God's agape that gives us the strength to be able to be transformed to live the non-violent lifestyle that Paul pointed out was basic to being Christian. And we can take heart because God’s spiritual power in our lives is stronger than the pressure of the world. That is the hope talked about by Paul (Romans 5:4-5). That is the hope upon which the whole future of the human race hinges.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)