Gnashing of Teeth

One morning my three year old daughter said to me with a grimace and a growl “I don’t like you!” The words hit me like a gut punch. My heart was crushed. My beautiful daughter, the one who made real the definition of love, had done the unthinkable. Despite, nay, because of my love for her, she had made the ultimate decision to reject my love and profess her disdain for me. She was in the midst of a tantrum focused on her absurd desire to stick a fork in her bedroom outlet. I had to intervene for her own protection. My love would not let her suffer such harm willingly. But now? This was different.

Instinctively I responded with, “Bobbie, I know that’s not true! You love me so much!”

“Nooo! I don’t like you! I’m going to run away!” She dug herself in deeper.

Whirling round she stomped out of her room. Down the hallway she ran, thumping her tiny feet all the way to the front door. It was still dark outside, 37 degrees, and raining. Fortunately, the door was locked. I had one more opportunity to plead with her to reconsider. But she would not relent, screaming that she wanted to go outside and run away.

What was I to do? My dilemma was this: while I loved her so deeply, I understood that the true completion and fulness of that love could only be arrived at through her completely free decision to return it. I had made a gamble. Love, true love, could only come to pass within the proper constraints, that of two independent parties willingly choosing to love the other, free of coercion. The risk, of course, was that one of the parties might not choose to love. There would be no recourse if Bobbie chose not to love me. Even so, I was tempted by the thought that I could unlock the door for her, send her out in the rainy darkness, and wait for her to come to her senses. Perhaps it would shake her enough that she would come back in and recant her obstinate free will choice to reject me. It probably would.

Ah, but there it is again. If I allowed her to suffer the bitter taste of her woeful will knowing that she would come back to me to re-establish our mutual affection, then I would know it was a lie. She would only say she loved me because she feared the cold, dark, night. Her love for me wouldn’t be genuine. It couldn’t be. Based on the premise of love I had already gambled on, I exposed myself to the real risk of loosing my daughters love. To coerce even a brief softening of her heart towards me by letting her out into the rain would be unconscionable. Once I opened that door, and once she stepped through it, there was nothing left to be done. She would be gone, forever.

Such is the gamble of loving your children. Perhaps Westley will choose a better path. If not, I do not know how many children I’ll have to have before I find one who does. But, this is the course I’ve set, and I’ve consider the risk of loving a dozen children who don’t love me back worth the joy of having just one who does. In time I’m sure I’ll forget the ones who reject me, because I’ll be so happy with the one who doesn’t.

We, the Western Evangelicals, have made a big todo over freewill. Our very dried out sterile definition of love demands it. God will not, cannot, force us to love him. A freewill expression of love is the only means by which we may enter into fellowship with Him. Anything less than our positive free will choice for God would inevitably be a coercive move on his part, and we cannot bear the thought of a God who would force our hand into loving him. After all, our independence is our most prized possession. We’ve reasoned ourselves into a rational trap.

On the one hand, the above fable, clearly fictitious, is ridiculous. If it doesn’t sound ridiculous to you, I’m not sure what to say other than you need to seriously recalibrate your notion of parental love. The one aspect of the story which is accurate, laughably, is Bobbie does sometime say to me “I don’t like you! I’m going to run away!” Yet I am far from offended or hurt when she says those things. Why? The answer couldn’t be more intuitive: my love for her isn’t dependent on her love for me. Every parent knows this, at least at first. Baby arrives in the world, doing absolutely nothing (save for needing absolutely everything) and you just love them so much. My love for her, combined with my relatively superior knowledge, ability, wisdom, age, stature, insight (…. relative to her, that is), means that I can fully encompass her tantrums and delusional declarations. One could say that all my qualities are appendages of the body of love, empowered to serve, protect, guide, nourish, and cherish my beautiful little girl. Far from crushing my heart, her protest toward me usually endears her to me. I understand why she feels that way. I understand it when she doesn’t. I see over, above, beyond, and around her limitations in the present moment. It would be absurd to assume that I needed her freewill choice to love me for things to work out between us.

Continuing more or less on the same hand, the above satire gets at the misconception we have about God needing our love. I enjoyed writing about how many children I’ll need to produce in order to find one that really loves me. It’s just hilariously wrong. I suspect most of us get that pretty well. I didn’t start having kids because I was so lonely and needed a child to love me. There is a general idea floating around in the aether of Evangelicalism that God considered making humanity a worthwhile risk. Some would choose to love him, some would not. The potential value of even a very small minority choosing to love Him makes it worth the risk. We Evangelicals have waived our hands and, poof, the dilemma of the great majority of humanity falling into either eternal torment or eternal annihilation goes away. God just doesn’t care about those people in comparison to how much he cares about those who independently choose to love him. (Well, there is also the harder lined Calvinist explanation, which would be to throw out all this nonsense about freewill and just call it like it is (according to Calvin). God himself chooses those who will choose him. Yikes.). Really, if you take time to feel it, the idea of me or you having a dozen or more children in hopes of finding a few, or even one, who will choose to love me the way I want is selfish. The concept is highly conditional. Its aloof. Its self-protective. Its disengaged. Its separate. Its demanding. Its risky. Its insecure. It sounds a lot like the God of Evangelicalism.

If the disparity between myself and my toddler is substantial and significant, then the disparity between humanity and God is more so to the extreme. And it is not an abstract impersonal disparity. It is relational, personal, intimate. The love a father and mother have for their infant is a mere shadow of the love God has for humanity. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and that should be an encouraging thought. He loves us better than we love our own children. I can’t even begin to list the individual circumstances in which I’ve heard the “His ways are higher than our ways” quote misused to justify tragedy and pain in our lives. Its essentially the theme verse for those who believe God personally manipulates every circumstance according to his will, but then need to find some recourse for understanding why God is orchestrating such enormous suffering for themselves or their loved ones. Especially the perception of judgement, condemnation, and final damnation. “His thoughts are not our thoughts, after all!”

In fact, the verse quoted above is so misunderstood and out of context it warrants taking the side trail it offers. Here’s enough of the passage from Isaiah 55 for us to see that this verse actually means the exact opposite of what people commonly use it for:

Seek the Lord while He may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way, 
and the unrighteous man his thoughts.
Let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, 
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, 
neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord. 
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, 
so are my ways higher than your ways, 
and my thoughts than your thoughts. 

The unthinkably higher nature of God’s thoughts and ways are manifested in his abundant willingness to have compassion. And just after the excerpt above Isaiah goes on to describe how God will bless and prosper both the land and the people with abundant peace. So, while many apply this passage as a justification for God’s supposed willingness to steal, kill, and destroy various aspects of our lives, it actually speaks to the profound opposite. How did we get that so wrong! I digress, however. While the can opened here provides us with a diverting compulsion to go fishing, I must pull myself back onto the original trail of thought.

Freewill. Too many dusty fingers and long beards have been scratching this itch for too long, I think. You may have noticed my slight but repeated emphasis on "independent choice” up to this point. The highly abstracted discussion around freewill, salvation, love, and damnation seem to regularly unmoor themselves from flesh and blood. We speak of God’s one command in the Garden of Eden being a logical necessity to allow for the existence of genuine reciprocated love. My fable mirrors the abstracted concept of God’s creation of freewill beings into the flesh and blood context of raising children, highlighting on obvious shortfall of human-centric considerations of freewill. Bobbie has freewill, certainly, but guess what? My will is bigger. Our world is full of both good and evil demonstrations of freewill being used for and against others. Us Evangelicals have been running around trying to rationalize why the vast majority of people will go to hell by leaning on an ultra-sterilized conceptualization of freewill while completely abandoning the concept (hopefully) when raising our own kids. We understand that you can’t just let your kids do whatever they want. They require loving and proactive intervention, course correction, instruction. We regularly overstep the freewill of our children, in the name of love, because we know that our parental will is a far more trustworthy guide to a pleasant life than theirs. But we don’t allow God such a privilege! Is it possible that, from God’s view, we are holding onto our freewill just like my daughter holds onto her desire to stick a fork in the outlet?

Let me wind this down with a comment or two on one of the most profound lessons on human nature I’ve gleaned from my first years of raising kids. The various books my wife and I have read, research we’ve done, and common knowledge we’ve received about childhood development indicate that the most formative years of a person’s life are the first ones. No surprise there, I hope. Yet, the implication, which has been hitting me over and over again, is this: I am a product of a formative process beyond and before my conscious awareness. Who and what am I? I’m sure I don’t know the full answer, but I know that the preponderance of my character finds its origin in the earliest years of my life, years of which I have no long term memory, nor had any hand in crafting. This isn’t to say I, or anyone else, can’t change. Rather, it is to observe the astonishing fact that we are dependent beings. We are formed in and through a relational construction process that precedes our conscious choice and willingness. That reads to both the earthly and heavenly dimensions. Western culture puts a premium value on independence and self-made worth; it is a cultural fundamental. Yet it is at odds with the very core of how humans grow into the world. If even in the natural realm a great portion of my ability to give and receive love is instilled in me through the parenting process, then how much more so in the spiritual? Having placed enormous weight on our individuality, we have drastically overestimated our in-dependence from both God and humanity. We are not self-made beings, not in a social sense, and especially not in a spiritual sense.

Am I suggesting that there is no such thing as freewill? It might feel that way. And that might be highly aggravating to some who view freewill as the stage upon which the drama of love plays out. Any apparent diminishment of the role of some cherished ideal will feel like its destruction. But, lets step back into the parenting metaphor once more. Is there anything Bobbie could do to make me love her less? A resounding “NO”. Even if she were to grow up and go wild, my love for her would remain, and it would stand with arms wide open till the day of reconciliation. This is all especially true for her toddler years, where for the first time she is grappling with emotions, desires, fears, and insecurities which completely overpower her immature capacities. My love for her transcends those difficulties (ok, sometimes just barely!), and allows me to be patient and kind, enduring, not irritable. In other words, her freewill in exploring all the new heights of emotion she’s only now becoming aware of is fully encompassed by my will as a superior being (relativity, remember). The hyper focus on freewill doesn’t make sense in the context of love. Some of you might cynically retort “wait till you have rebellious teenagers” and to you I’d say, “when is the last time you took stock of genuine love?” Love does not seek its own. True love, I’d suggest, even as a summary of the famous 1 Corinthians 13 passage, submits to the beloved for the sake of the beloved. If I possess freewill in my marriage, I gladly submit it to my wife, because if she’s happy, I’m happy. We’re on a path of becoming one, and independence finds itself less and less useful on that path. Certainly we find the limits of our love when faced with challenging people in or out of the family. But, those limits more likely highlight the shape of our selfishness rather than reveal an essential component of divine love. Lets not redefine love to accommodate our egos.

I suppose I should finally concede that there is merit to the goal of love being a freewill choice. But, first and foremost, we have to be taught how to make that choice. Our capacity to love freely arises out of a subjectively defined process of growth, discipline, and discovery within the context of a loving relationship. It doesn’t occur in some clinical setting where you or I as fully autonomous beings choose, with no outside influence, to love. Love is relational. It is modeled and taught in the context of one who loves the beloved. Then, like a student who masters the piano can choose to play Liszt, Brahms, or Mozart, we who have been taught by God’s love can choose to love like he does. As we (my diligent wife and myself) watch over our two waddling and toddling progeny, we are constantly aiming them in the right direction in so far as we can manage. We correct and steer and model and encourage and praise and admonish. Our deepest hope and desire is to protect what is good and pure and to prune what is malicious and antisocial. That process, some research suggests, begins even in the womb! Bobbie and Westley are in our hand, so to speak, as they mature through toddlerhood, childhood, and adolescence. They have freewill, but unless a more experienced will can mold and develop it, it will not do them any favors. We aim them like an arrow shot from a bow, but once the arrow is in the air, its own constitution determines the trajectory of its flight.

I propose this is a better understanding of freewill. The volitional self is better understood as an object in motion, surrounded by other objects in motion, moving through a medium which itself completely surrounds it. Does God throw up his hands and say “Fine! Have it your way!” and then walk out on us? We place upon God imaginary cosmic handcuffs regarding our own freewill, yet regularly usurp authority from our toddlers for their own good. We give not even a second’s thought about having restricted God from engaging in the same common sensical parenting strategy.