A well-known Christian wrote these famous words: "And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." And the very next sentence reads "Make love your aim."Jews, Muslims, a host of other believers and non-believers too would agree: "Amo, ergo sum"--I love, therefore I am. Love is the business of humanity; if we're out of love, we're out of business. There is no smaller package in this world than that of a person all wrapped up in himself. It is better not to live than not to love.
It is a bedrock conviction of many religious faiths that all 5 billion of us on the planet belong one to another. That's the way God made us. From a Christian point of view, Christ died to keep us that way. Our sin is only and always that we put asunder what God has joined together.
Good religion makes love the central value of human life. Bad religion deifies doctrines and creeds. While creeds and doctrines are indispensable to religious life, they are only so as signposts. Love is the sole hitching post. The reasons are clear: doctrines can divide; love can only unite. Doctrines also are not immune to error. Let's not forget the many doctrines that once upheld slavery and apartheid, and the few that still keep women in the status of second-class citizens.
The same is true of religious traditions. Never should we ignore the wisdom of our ancestors. But a tradition is not an oracle; rather it is a constant challenge, an unending task. And a tradition that cannot be changed also cannot be preserved. That lesson is as old as history itself.
Put differently, religious people have always both to recover tradition and to recover from it.
If, as Scripture says, "God is love," then human freedom is for real. As Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor properly discerned, freedom is a burden, choice is scary. But freedom is the absolutely necessary precondition of love. We are not slaves but children of our heavenly Father/Mother, free to do good, free to do evil. So when in anguish over any human violence done any innocent people we ask of God "How could you let that happen?" let's remember that at that precise moment God is asking the same question of us.
God doesn't go around the world with fingers on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on the controls of airplanes. It's outrageous to credit God with the worst follies of humankind. They're our fault--and they break God's heart. We're to blame for desecrating God's creation, ravaging the earth as if there were no tomorrow. It's our fault--and shame--that we show so little imaginative sympathy for the plight of the poor the world around. And God who beats "swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks" surely must long to have us ponder Thomas Mann's contention that "war is a coward's escape from the problems of peace."
The essential reality of human existence is ethical. The world swings on an ethical hinge; mess with that hinge and both nature and history will feel the shock. It's all up to us. God will not intervene at the expense of human freedom. But ask of God a thimbleful of help and you will get an oceanful in return. God provides maximum support, minimum protection.
Few things, I imagine, could be more pleasing to God than for all of us--believers and non-believers alike--to join together in pledging allegiance "to earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports; one planet indivisible, with clean air, soil and water, with liberty, justice and peace for all".
The times are perilous. With poet Grace Paley, we see "a widening darkness between our lucky stars." For the world to survive we must become what God made us to be--caring citizens of a global humanity.
