Love in Action...

A mantra that resonates throughout my whole being these days was written in the book The Brothers Karamazov by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dorothy Day was a big fan of Dostoyevsky’s work, and her words have also been stewing within me as I reflect upon the words of Jesus and the challenge to live the Gospel. Dostoyevsky writes that “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

It occurs to me from time to time that life is work, and loving requires a “long apprenticeship”, as Dostoyevsky also notes in the The Brothers Karamazov. The easy roads are rarely sustainable, for they are often destructive and tend to be self-focused. On these journeys our attention is often diverted as we look for pleasure rather than joy. But, it is true that I am oversimplifying a bit, for each of us are guilty of seeking what is comfortable in our day to day lives, and avoiding what is painful or difficult. There are few people I know who would intentionally walk into a lion’s den, and this is a very good thing.

Yet, learning to love requires that we begin to see the beauty beyond the agony and brokenness in our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are invited to enter both the agony and the ecstasy of one another—the joys and sorrows of those who suffer with us on our journey to God.

To look at reality as it is, then, is to begin to see what is both terrifyingly beautiful and completely broken. The old nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” goes like this: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/All the kings horses and all the kings me/Could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again”.

The precise origin of the rhyme is relatively unknown, and it’s meaning is also uncertain. Without doing extensive research on this egg character developed within the last few hundred years in Great Britain, I will posit that it came from a place of sight—where one person noted that some brokenness

cannot be fixed by us and the systems that we create.

And so it is with us if we truly see reality as it is. We love the broken in our world and find that each member of the broken body is singing to us of ourselves. Their brokenness is rarely neat or pretty. The great temptation is to be indifferent to it all and seek our own interests. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we begin to know that we are Humpty Dumpty, and that the systems in our lives cannot piece us back together again. We need each other to be whole.

So we look to a person—Jesus, the Christ who is our hope, the One who promises to make us into “new creations” and invites us to love one another. Let us be on our way, though “learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever” (The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky).

Christy Hicks is a Campus Minister in Griesedieck Complex.