SHIFTING CONTAINERS – Emotional Capacity (part 2)

Last week, in PART 1 of expanding our emotional capacity, we explored the ability to love deeper, to love wider, to love more extravagantly, and to love completely differently.  We looked at the ligament of love – the “bond of perfectness” (Colossians 3:14) that binds all virtues into perfection.

This week we explore four kinds of love that we are seldom taught:

• A Kenosis love
• A Glasnost love
• A Sine-qua-non love
• An Empath’s love

A KENOSIS LOVE

Kenosis, as a Christian definition, is the act of emptying oneself of one’s own will and becoming entirely receptive to God’s divine will.  It is embodied in Christ Emmanuel by the renunciation of His divine nature and becoming incarnated into the world. In Christian theology, and what it means to every believer, kenosis is the principle described in Philippians 2:7 where we read that Jesus “made himself nothing”.

Kenosis love, or self-emptying love, is also revealed magnificently in the Trinity.  God the Father, who is Love, completely empties Himself into the Son; the Son empties into the Spirit; and the Spirit empties into the Father. Incarnation flows from this kenosis that is inherent to God’s nature.  It is a self-emptying love that exists for the benefit of others.  This is, as Cynthia Breault writes, “the way of kenosis, the revolutionary path that Jesus introduced into the consciousness of the West.”

Cynthia explains: “For the vast majority of the world’s spiritual seekers, the way to God is “up.” Deeply embedded in our religious and spiritual traditions—and most likely in the human collective unconscious itself—is a kind of compass that tells us that the spiritual journey is an ascent, not a descent.  And yet Jesus had only one “operational mode”. . . “down”  In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher.”

Jesus’ entire life demonstrates how God loves with an unconditional and selfless kenosis love. For God so loved… that He gave (John 3:16); a self-emptying love.  Why hasn’t Western Christianity emphasized what seems so obvious and clear?  If we truly seek to build capacity and to contain more of Christ, the route is “down”.  Not getting fuller with love but emptier of ourselves.

This KENOSIS LOVE was always the subject of Jesus’ teachings and is why He focused on self-denial and not self-enrichment.  The irony in Jesus’ teaching, as Richard Rohr puts it, is that: “when I’m nothing, I’m everything. When I’m empty, I’m full. This is why so few people truly seek an authentic spiritual life. Who wants to be nothing? We’ve been told the whole point was to be somebody.  The ego is naturally attracted to heroic language, and so we focused on the heroic instead of transformation.  Jesus’ teaching was more about becoming a loving, humble, and servant-like person than a hero by any of our normal standards.”

But Kenosis love must be revealed as Glasnost love

A GLASNOST LOVE

During the days of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (reformation), when Russia started the arduous process of opening up its borders to the “outside world” and many mission organizations from the West shifted their attention to this new field of ministry, the Orthodox Church in Russia realized the dangers of foreign theologies and became suspicious of any stranger attending a service.

One of my colleagues, visiting Leningrad (St Petersburg) during this time attended a Russian Orthodox Church on a Sunday morning with a desire to celebrate communion with local brothers and sisters.  When the priest approached my friend, there was an immediate hesitation and the priest refused to offer the bread and wine to this suspicious-looking stranger.  Deeply saddened my friend got up and left the Church, heartbroken that after many years of service in this nation he loved so much, he was unable to celebrate the bread and wine with people he loved and respected.

After walking for a few blocks, he suddenly realized that he was being followed by the brother that sat next to him in Church.  The man ran after him with his cup and piece of bread in his hand and asked if he could serve my friend and offer him communion in the street.  My friend was overwhelmed by this gesture of solidarity.  He looked at the man and asked the obvious question,  “Why are you doing this when your priest refused to serve me?”  The answer was clear: “My brother, sometimes you need to love people more than your Church allows you to.”

These words, and this principle, have stuck with me for the past 30 years of ministry; to have a Glasnost love, an open love that passes all understanding, all borders and defies all reasoning.

• To have an openness to love more than is allowed,
• to risk more than is required,
• to encourage more than is deserved,
• to sacrifice more than is expected,
• to be kinder than is anticipated,
• to trust more than is reasonable,
• to work harder than is demanded,
• to give more than is necessary and an openness
• to bless more than is anticipated.

Oh, may God have mercy on us when we watch the news, and like Jonah of old, determine in our own minds who could be loved, who should be loved and who is undeserving of our love.  May God have mercy on us when we judge those who are racially different, culturally strange, or theologically odd.  May we find grace to have a “Glasnost” in our hearts with an openness to love more than our community allows us to.

A SINE QUA NON LOVE

Sine qua non implies something that is absolutely indispensable or essential, a non-negotiable, and a prerequisite.  In the same sense that believing in Christ is a sine qua non for being saved, so loving our enemy and forgiving those who mean harm to us is a sine qua non for every follower of Christ.

The challenge however is that many things that Christians feel are sine qua nons or “non-negotiables” today are at major variance with what Jesus actually taught and emphasized. How can we read the eight Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and not know that Jesus clearly taught love, peace, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity, nonviolence, and simplicity of life?  It is impossible.  But what often happens is that we read these Scriptures, that deeply contradict our attitudes and our lifestyles, with lenses that disallow them to penetrate our hearts.  When God’s “non-negotiables” challenge our lifestyles, we tend to create new non-negotiables and dilute the essence and prerequisites of what the Gospel is all about.

We have slowly fallen away from the core of the teaching of Jesus and created, as Richard Rohr calls it, “a new set of non-negotiables as an evacuation plan for the next world”.

In order to return to the non-negotiables of Scripture, we need to enlarge our emotional capacity of love, peace, reconciliation, and charity.  This is not a quote by the author of this book but a quote from the Author of life.

AN EMPATH’S LOVE

If 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 is understood correctly, Christ is described as what modern phycologists would call an EMPATH.  This term describes a person with high levels of care, great compassion, a born comforter who is generally very understanding of others and their positions.  It is a person who oftentimes will ask questions rather than make snap judgments, or intuitively seems to “know” there is more to a story than meets the eye.  Empaths are people who don’t “read” the future, they “read” people.  They are able to make special connections with the people around them and can sense when they are needed.

Being an empath is not about having the ability to feel SYMPATHY for people but having the ability to feel EMPATHY with people. Sympathy is when we feel a sense of care and concern for other people.  When we sympathize with someone, it means we feel compassion for them and hope that their situation improves.  Empathy is the ability to feel the needs of others as if it were us. When someone is an empath, it means they have an especially deep understanding and connection to the feelings of people around them.  Empaths can feel other people’s feelings almost as if they were their own.

This sounds exactly like Jesus when He stood at the grave of Lazarus and wept (John 11:35), knowing well that He would raise him from the dead.  Or in Luke 19:41  when He saw the city and He wept.  We read about the compassion of Jesus the empath in Luke 7:13 when He saw the dead son of a widow and He had compassion, in Matthew 9:36  when He saw the crowds and He was moved with kindness and also in Matthew 14:14 when He saw the multitude and He was moved with empathy.  His words reflect someone who deeply notices the needs in others even before He recognises His own.  In Matthew 15: 32, when He saw the hungry He said to His disciples, “I have compassion on them.”  In Matthew 20:34 He saw the blind man and He had compassion, as He did with the leper in Mark 1:41 and those who were like sheep without a shepherd in Mark 6:34.

Wow, what a Saviour.  Not like the one who demands submission at all times but the empath, the One who is known by one word: LOVE.

Richard Rohr refers to the beatitude in Matthew 5:4 — Blessed are those who mourn — as a reference by the Lord that “until you have cried you don’t know God.”

But, ultimately, in one way or another, the character traits of an empath should be evident in the life of anyone who dares to follow Christ, the Father of compassion.  The challenge in an age of anger, suspicion, and self-fulfillment is how to enlarge this capacity and develop this character trait.

Amazingly, once we start building our emotional capacity we will soon discover the need to build our intentional capacity.

You are most welcome to order the book CAPACITY from Mike at thirdwayinfo@gmail.com