The Nearness of God

“I love humanity, but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams I am ready to die by crucifixion for all mankind, but I cannot be kind and patient with a man staying with me for two days.” So says Madame H to Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov.

It is very easy for us to imagine how God loves all of humanity, for it is very easy for us to love all of humanity. We live in an age and culture that facilitates our love of humanity. However, it is very difficult for us to imagine God loving us individually for it is very difficult for us to love our fellow men as individuals.

To love mankind we make men into something they are not. We gloss over their sins and view them through rose colored glasses. We forget their flaws and exaggerate their goodness. In our minds we create reasons to love them, block out the reasons we should not love them so that we may love all men as one. I am not saying we shouldn’t love every man, of course we should! Every man is made in the image of God and has value beyond what we can comprehend. What I am saying is this little charade we play when we talk of loving mankind is not love.

How often does one worry about villages in Africa affected by AIDS while refusing to make eye contact with the AIDS infected junkie panhandling on the street? We lament the destruction inflicted upon Thailand by the tsunami, but are we only able to do this because we consciously forget the fact that Thailand is the world’s sex tourism capital? There are countless men in Thailand who kidnap and hold captive countless little girls and pimp them out to rich foreigners. When we consider their deaths do we mourn? We mourn the loss of indigenous cultures that have been wiped away by the cultural imperialism of the West. But are we only able to do so because we forget that the great cultures of the Mayans and Aztecs barbarically sacrificed alive countless men and woman and innocent children?

It is noble to give money for AIDS relief in Africa or victims in Thailand. And we can mourn some aspects of lost cultures, but all too often we only do so by treating them as less than human. We sugar-coat their failures and pretend that they are good so that we may deem them worthy of our love and honor. It is very easy to do this with people that live far away in space or time or with some generalized, conceptual picture of humanity. That is why it is so easy to ‘love’ mankind. There is nothing of man in it! It is a notion and not a person. It is ideal and not real. It never insults us or disrespects us as real men do.

It is impossible to idealize those that we know and that is why it is so difficult to love those closest to us. We cannot gloss over their flaws; we are reminded of their flaws every day. They hurt and insult us. We see that many times their predicaments are the consequences of their stupid and selfish choices—that makes it hard for us to feel sorry or merciful to them.

But true love does not look for reasons to love a man; it loves a man and by doing so finds the reasons a man is worth loving. Mercy does not require reason to give mercy; it is mercy precisely because it is undeserved. To truly love mankind one must begin by truly loving his neighbor. Once he loves the man closest to him, the one he knows best, the one’s faults he knows most intimately, only then can he truly love the man he has never and indeed this love will be easy. Loving one’s neighbor is difficult, far greater than loving ‘humanity’. This is why Christ commanded us to love our neighbor and not all of humanity, for in doing the former we do the latter.

God knows us deeply, He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows us faults and all and loves us in sin and brokenness. God does not begin by loving all of humanity in general and working his way down to us as individuals. He loves us deeply and personally as individuals and out of this personal love comes His great love of humanity.

God is not constrained by space as we are. We must never weaken God’s love for us (and in so weaken God) by conceiving his love for us as love for a part of humanity. For our notion of the love of humanity involves a watered down notion of both love and humanity. Instead we must imagine ourselves loving completely a person who we know fully. We must think of loving them in truth; loving them as they are and not as we wish they would be. Only then can we get a glimpse of how God loves each and every one of us.