As a child, I loved Grandma O’donnell. But–my love for her was less than ideal. Each summer we drove two days from NM to her farm in central Missouri. And the first thing I’d do when I hopped out of the station wagon after we pulled up her long dirt driveway was ask her a question: “When can we go shopping?” On the first day of each summer visit, Grandma would take my brother Craig and me to the WalMart in Marysville and let us have any toy we desired. I couldn’t wait to see Grandma each summer–so I could get that toy. I couldn’t wait to pull up to her house–so I could get that toy. At that age, my immature love saw Grandma primarily as a means to getting something I wanted. My love for her was less about her and more about me, and what she could do for me.
Bernard of Clairvaux wisely saw that this same thing happens when it comes to us and God. Bernard believed we move through four degrees of love as we mature in life toward the goal of union:
Love of self for self’s sake.
Love of God for self’s sake.
Love of God for God’s sake.
Love of self for God’s sake.
Even if we mature past the first degree, and we invite God into our lives, many of us never grow past treating God the way I treated Grandma. He becomes just a means to an end. Religion becomes less about God and more about me, and what God can do for me. We love God…for self’s sake.
This manifests itself in two ways: power and pain.
When we enter into times of pain, this way of loving God may emerge. As we lose loved ones, health, financial security, friends, clarity about our future, or endure any other kind of suffering, it may become clearer to us just how much we loved God primarily because he had given us those loved ones, that health, that financial security, those friends, etc. But now that those things are gone, can we still love God?
This was the dilemma in the book of Job–Satan arguing that Job only loved God because God had taken Job shopping and filled his cart with livestock and land and loved ones. But Job, Satan argued, would stop loving God when God stopped giving him gifts. Thankfully, Satan was wrong. Job modeled a far more mature degree of love.
This second degree of love also emerges around the issue of power. And this is where we find a direct tie to our theme of “all in.” For some, God and religion become a means to an end–that of dictating who gets in and who doesn’t. There are Christians who love God largely because of how they wrongly believe God grants them power to use moral, spiritual and positional authority over others. It is intoxicating to use God to point out all the specks in all the eyes of all the people around us. It is intoxicating to lift our eyes to heaven and thank God that we are not like that tax collector over there. Christianity and the church become the ultimate sandbox where we get to be king or queen for the day and where we get the final say in who’s in and who’s out.
In her grueling book Mississippi Praying, Carolyn Renee Dupont fleshes out this stark truth about churches and Christians in the South:
“But the façade of silence cloaked a truth far more revealing: not only did white Christians fail to fight for black equality, they often labored mightily against it.”
Then and now the Christian faith has been marshalled by people with power and privilege to labor against the inclusion of those without power and privilege. Too often we have loved God not for the sake of others but for the sake of self. Faith became a means of strengthening our grip on resources and solidifying our status near the top of the ladder. And this, Bernard argued as far back as the 11th century, is no love at all.
