Adverbs in the Great Commandment?

In my last couple of postings, I commented on new understandings that came when I studied the agape versions of NT passages. I reflected in that posting on the first of 2 ideas that came from the word “whole” in the Great Commandment. In today’s posting I want to share the 2nd idea.

I began to wonder about the shift in perspective we could get if we thought of the nouns in the Great Commandment as though they were adverbs. That may sound a little strange, but here is how it could read: “You must agapao the Lord your God wholeheartedly, soulfully, and mindfully.”

Sometimes nouns and pronouns are what get us into trouble with identity issues. In elementary school we are taught that a noun has to refer to a person, place, or thing. So it gets drilled into us in the very early stages of development, when we also are taught that we have to form a separate ego identity (not in so many words, of course). So we start thinking that a noun has to stand for ‘something.’ Eventually then, in our youthful thought processes, we think that a 'mind' is something, and an 'ego' identity is something, and even that a 'soul' must therefore be something that is solid somewhere inside us.

But when we use adverbs in the Great Commandment, we no longer think in ego-identity terms, so we don’t have think of a ‘mind’ as something that ‘exists separately,’ or a ‘soul’ as something that ‘exists separately,’ or even a ‘heart’ as something that produces emotions.

With such a shift in perspective, we can see new meaning in being commanded to “agapao the Lord your God wholeheartedly, soulfully, and mindfully.” So we no longer have to think that we somehow need to take some ‘thing’ inside us and use it to generate something toward God.

Also in my last posting, I wrote about what it means to be commanded into an agape relationship with God, and how that very relationship brings whole-ness to life. I realized that such wholeness has a profound impact on our sense of identity.

So agape works in us (as a gift from God) to get us unstuck from that strange ego identity (that people in the modern world think they have to form). Instead of identifying with some ego that we formed by thinking of all the ways that each of us is different and separated, we can think of our identity in life as formed from the relationship with God. It is through the loving power of agape that we open up to wholeheartedly, soulfully, and mindfully accept the divine Presence permeating us and simultaneously helping us identify with the vastness of divine Presence.

It is often said that such opening up is the profound awareness of being “a child of God.”

Of course, that’s not possible to experience if we try to approach God while we are locked in ego identity, because that ‘sense of selfness’ (that gets referred to as ‘ego’) is so dependent on being separate. But such an all-important sense of wholeness, which is necessary for faith development, cannot happen for a person who tries to identify mainly with that false impression of being separated from God.

But, if over the years of our personality development, we thought we had to ‘build an ego’ by defending against everything that is ‘out there,’ then we have to start over. In a sense we have to reverse the process of identifying. A person has to get beyond any type of ego identity in order to realize the wholeness in relationship with God.

The beautiful good news is that God starts the process by making agape available to each of us, and all we have to do is allow God’s agape to open us up.