"REJOICE: I MEAN IT"--Paul, Probably
The Obligations of Praise, or Why We Are Commanded to Do Desirable Things
During seminary, I took up a volume that I had no idea how to read, Soren Kierkegaard’s The Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing. There’s much to commend it, but the primary conundrum which emerged from me is something that he deals with early in the book: “How is it that love is commanded of us?” If you’ve been around Christianity for more than a minute, you’ll recall that Jesus’s summation of the Law runs something like this:
And when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they themselves gathered together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested Him with a question: “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?”
Jesus declared, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
If we’re used to thinking of love as a spontaneous motion of the soul, that affection which is wild and uncontrollable, then Kiekegaard’s mundane observation that love is frequently commanded of us strikes us unpleasantly. I don’t think it’s the case that, absent conversion, people are unable to love—to love is simply to recognize value, however mis-identified or misappropriated. But that we have to be commanded to love both God and our neighbor seems to indicate that there is an intrinsic connection between giving love to God and to our neighbors before all others whom we might love.
One might say that we are obligated to love God and our neighbor in ways that don’t fit for our families (unless we see our very families as “neighbors”, subject to all of the distance and strangeness which is entailed with “neighbors”).1 But in any event, that we are obligated to love opens up the possibility that, those things which we concieve of doing “naturally” are nothing other than gifts, that the ability to love is something which God makes possible in us, healing us as we learn to love well.
The Obligations of Gratitude
The ancients talk pretty frequently about the fittingness of gratitude—that a social inferior should thank their benefactor or their superior for something given to them. They don’t (always) commend this as a means of sucking up, but as a means of a person’s actions reflecting the right order of things: it is right and good for someone of lesser social rank to be grateful for what they’ve been given by someone of higher social rank. If it’s the wealthy who offer benefaction to society, then all of us day laborers need are obligated to be grateful, for it is our due. It’s a fairly undemocratic way to think about gratitude—that it reifies social inequality—but there’s also something to us being grateful for those who provide for us, however old we are.2 I bring this up to make this point: it’s not like the folks who had to have their needs met by a wealthy benefactor liked that situation, of being on the receiving end of generosity instead of the giving end. There’s any amount of injustice which gets coded as “fitting” in these kinds of situations. But the ancients held that—because of the material benefits flowing from A to B—it was right and just to offer gratitude, felt or unfelt.
Reading this thesis—that we are commanded to love—something I might take to be a natural occurrence otherwise, turns my head around. What else might I have been missing all this time? What else have I been doing, taking to be spontaneous, and needing to bring into a more disciplined way? There’s good reasons, with love for example, that we are commanded in our loving: we don’t naturally love those who do us harm, but this kind of love, we are told, most closely mirrors the kind of love that God has for humanity.3 We don’t love those who are socially different from us, but yet, this is what it looks like to fulfill the love of neighbor.4 These kinds of love are not intuitive to us, and thus, must be commanded, that in their commanding, they might become habit: we step into a pair of shoes that do not fit and walk around until our feet grow into them.
And so, with gratitude, I think. The injunction from St. Paul, in the title of this piece, runs this way in Philippians 4:
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
So many commands for so many things we think of as spontaneous! In some ways, the obligation is not the thing itself: it is a precursor to habit—my oldest must be told to hold his glove a certain way when playing baseball so that he doesn’t have to be told to do it eventually. But in other ways, the obligations stated here are the constant prods of memory for a people under duress. We’re always under duress, right? So why would I suppose that I would need anything less than something in the shape of a command?
Another possibility here is that, in being commanded to do something which we assume to be natural (in this case, rejoicing) is that in being commanded, we are invited to take inventory of the things for which we have to be grateful for: it is an awakening of the senses so that what we take to be natural, we are able to see truly as a gift. In that spirit, a bit of departure from the normal format, and an invitation for you as well:
Three Things For Which I’m Grateful
The Brothers K by David James Duncan. I’m re-reading it for my book club, and so glad to. It’s my nomination for the Great American Novel, and the magic never wears off.
Upcoming speaking opportunities. I’m speaking several times in the next few months, and always glad to have a chance to share what I’m learning and writing on. If you’re in Denver in November, or Chicago in January, would love to meet up.
My kids. Every morning, the kids come climb into our bed, just for a few minutes, to say good morning and snuggle before running off to play. They’re still young and this won’t last forever, and so every day, I say yes. And every day, I find myself more grateful than I can say. Heart asplode.
In the comments: what’s a thing you find yourself grateful for? Bonus points if it’s not something you’d intuitively love to be grateful for.
I’m inclined to say that “neighbor” encapsulates all relationships. Unless we treat families and loved ones under the “neighbor” category, we might think that the love we have for our families is not in need of sanctification or healing, and just fine the way it is. I deal with this question in my book, FWIW.
In a society like ours, where the wealthy frequently pay a lower tax rate than the middle income folks, it raises the question as to whether withholding gratitude is the more appropriate gesture.
Romans 5:8— “While we were yet sinners, Christ dies for us.”
The parable of the Good Samaritan.