This

by Michael Gungor

  She reached out her braced hand to me and asked me to help her lie down.

  But how could I do that? If my actual mother visited my house, would I allow her to sleep on the damp ground with the rats while I slept inside in my warm king bed? Of course not! I’d rather sleep in the grass myself. But what could I do? Drive her back to my house and ask my wife to let her sleep in our bed with us? Have her sleep with our little girls downstairs? That didn’t feel wise. I felt so powerless.

  I took her hand and lowered her frail body onto the cold, damp earth. I couldn’t keep the tears contained in my eyes anymore. I quickly wiped my face so she wouldn’t see and feel ashamed. She asked if I could open the bottle of water for her. I opened it and handed it back. Still holding the brown paper McDonald’s bag, I awkwardly asked her if she wanted any french fries. She politely declined as another couple of rats scampered a few feet away.

  • • • • •

  To allow the prickly edges of the human ego to melt into the infinite ocean of loving awareness in this world is often an exceedingly painful endeavor. It is much easier to keep one’s rib cage closed, one’s heart small and manageable. True union with THIS, after all, isn’t only to be one with the stars, flowers, saints, and sages, but also with the criminals, bigots, diseased, and despised. How can a judge or juror send a man to death row when he knows the convicted is his brother? How can a soldier fight in a war when she knows that national identities are nothing but stories? How can an activist who understands the severity of human-induced climate change continue to travel, work, eat, and live when he knows how all of it only worsens the problem? How can a loving and awake parent take her children to Disneyland knowing the pitfalls of capitalism, the rampant patriarchy of so many Disney stories, and that the money could easily be spent instead on giving other children access to clean water? And how, in God’s name, can I lay our Mother down in the grass to sleep with the rats? In other words, trying to love in a world like this is a mess.

  I drove by my daughter’s school today and noticed a mural on one of the exterior walls. It was a series of ocean waves, and it said, “You, I, we . . . are love!” I thought it was lovely and it made me wonder for a moment why I am spending so much time writing this book when that’s a pretty good summation of all I have to say. But it also made me think how easily and casually love is usually thought of in our culture—perhaps especially in LA! It sounds so nice and romantic to say that we are all love. All we need is love! Love is the answer! This sort of thing is everywhere in progressive culture.

  Every creed, race, gender, and orientation is welcome at this taco truck!

  In my neighborhood, the messages of love and inclusion are literally stenciled on the sidewalks. The concept of love is cool. It’s also a potent concept to unite a group and enable them to feel superior to others.

  We are so much more loving than those assholes!

  But the reality of love isn’t always so convenient. Extending love to everything and everyone at the end of a yoga session may be a wonderful thing to say, but to actually put that into practice is often a bloody, painful shit show because it involves knowingly accepting and even causing potential suffering for those you love. To buy a dog for your kid is to ensure their heart will be broken sometime in the next decade or two when their beloved dog dies. To sell all that you have and give it to the poor is to create the need for someone else to have to take care of your broke ass. Love is rarely as clean or simple as our greeting cards, love songs, or rom-coms present it. To love one person is sometimes to break the heart of another. Love isn’t all chocolate and roses and strummed ukuleles. Love also sometimes involves conflict, embarrassment, and bloody crosses.

  And it is because of this complexity, I think, that of these three stories I’m telling about the nature of THIS, THIS is love presents perhaps the most poignant opportunity to harmonize some of the thoughts from both the ancient trees (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) and some of the newer sprouts (physics, integral theory, post-structuralism, etc.) Thoughts that may, on the surface, appear to be contradictory can find a harmony and synergy within a topic like love, that has so much room for depth, nuance, and even conflict. In this balance, perhaps we can find ourselves loving THIS without being overwhelmed or lost to feelings of hopelessness or futility.

  Perhaps we could begin the fusing of some of these meta-stories about love with the Christian notion of love. “God is love” was and is, for me, the most powerful declaration of the Christian tradition. That idea is at the heart of the best expressions of Christianity throughout history, and it is the reason that I never became anti-religious, even as an atheist. For all that the biblical authors got wrong about issues like gender, sexuality, or cosmology, they got a lot right about love. There are few pieces of writing that have been as important or impactful in my own life as Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, St. Paul’s famous exposition about love in 1 Corinthians 13, or even some of the verses in 1 John that equate loving God with loving one’s neighbor.

  The Christian idea of incarnation and its relationship to love is one of my favorite aspects of the faith. For God so loved the world that he gave: himself. We humans are always telling stories about the hero who kills all of his enemies or the great ruler who brings glory to his people through might, riches, and power, but in the Christian story, the great omnipotent King of the Universe empties himself of his glory, splendor, and power and takes up residence in the screaming, vulnerable, body of a human baby being pushed through a stretched and bloody vulva. In this story, the King of Kings is not born in a palace to a Caesar, but in a manger to a teenaged refugee. In this story, Jesus claims identity not with the rich and powerful oppressors of his day, but with those who are on the underside of power. Children loved him. Prostitutes revered him. Religious leaders hated him. He taught people about loving one’s enemies and taught that his true disciples would be known by their love. His radical life and message of love led to his brutal, state-sanctioned murder, even as he prayed with some of his final breaths, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” Then, in the story of his resurrection, love is shown to be the ultimate reality in the universe—more powerful even than death.

  Here’s a quote from Science Mike’s (Mike McHargue is his real name) book, Finding God in the Waves,44 about how meaningful the story of Christ’s resurrection is for him in his experience of reality:

  One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to being alive in something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our sun's dust will meet with other stars' remains and form new stars and planets of their own. The Universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, burial, and resurrection. It seems poetically appropriate that the Source of All would've left this divine signature on the fabric of reality.

  When it is held with open hands rather than constricted into literalism and fundamentalism, I think the Christian story has the ability to inspire a tremendous amount of faith, hope, and love in the world today, as it has for nearly two thousand years. Christian love has given us people like St. Francis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten Boom, Henri Nouwen, and countless other inspiring, world-changing figures. Christian love has given us children’s hospitals, needle exchange programs, and clean water for people without access to it. Christian love has clothed the naked, fed the hungry, and cared for countless widows and orphans throughout twenty centuries of history. The love that I have personally witnessed and experienced within the Christian community throughout my life made it impossible for me to not maintain some level of affection and gratitude for the Church, even when I let go of the Church’s God.

  Still, with all of the good that Christianity’s notion of love has brought to the world, it seems to me that there is a fly in the ointment—a disjointedness at the heart of Christian theology that can sometimes limit the efficacy of its gospel. This disjoin
tedness is, as we’ve seen, the egocentrism and assumption of separateness between God and his creation at the core of the Christian imagination.

  To begin to understand why this is a problem when it comes to love, consider this scenario:

  You fall head over heels in love with someone. You decide to take them on a nice date and tell them how you feel. One night, after eating together at an upscale restaurant, the two of you go on a romantic walk in the soft glow of the moonlight. When the mood feels just right, you stop walking, and turn to face your beloved. “I love you,” you whisper for the very first time. Your darling smiles and then responds, “Thank you for telling me that. Honestly, I have no desire for you. I don’t really feel like loving you, as you do nothing for me emotionally. But I am a Christian and believe strongly that it is my duty to love in a way that is ultimately selfless. Because of this, I think this may be a great opportunity to serve God and fulfill my Christian duties to live for the happiness of others and not myself. So, in selfless service and humble obedience to God, I say to you, my dear, I love you too!”

  That’s not really the stuff of romance novels. My guess is that you wouldn’t be thrilled with that response. But why is that? Don’t you want somebody to love you selflessly? To serve you and do what they think is right?

  Now, let’s go back to the “I love you” on the moonlight walk one more time, only this time, imagine they respond like this instead: “To be honest with you, there are a million reasons in my head why I shouldn’t fall in love right now. But, with you, I can’t help myself. I’m hooked. I need you. I desire you. I love you with every fiber of my being.”

  Which of the two responses would you prefer? The selfless response about duty or the selfish response about addiction and desire? Or here’s another question: While making love to someone, would you rather have a partner who is moaning and writhing with the pleasure they are feeling in their own bodies, or someone who felt nothing for themselves, but dutifully and obediently offered pleasure to you as an act of selfless humility and compassion? These are easy answers for most of us because the truth is that we want people to be selfish in their love for us. Not entirely selfish to the degree that they don’t actually love us or consider our needs and feelings, but also not selfless to the degree that they are merely principled automatons.

  Love is most powerful when loving you is loving myself.

  Think of the language we use to describe how it feels when we love someone. We feel close to them. We feel connected to them. In matrimony, two hearts are said to be joined as one. Two become one flesh. The experience of love is the experience of a reduced sense of emotional distance. Love brings us together. Absolute love is an absolute closing of any perceived distance—where your heart becomes my heart, your pleasure becomes my pleasure, your desire becomes my desire.

  How can we ever truly love God or our neighbor (the primary commandments for the Christian as laid out by Jesus himself) if we remain fundamentally separated from both God and our neighbor? How could you love someone if there wasn’t anything in you that desired to love them? And what desire of the self is not “selfish”? When a hero jumps in a freezing river to save a stranger, and you ask them why, they usually respond with something seemingly self-effacing like “it was just the right thing to do.” Or “I didn’t even think about it. I just did it.” And that may be true. But why did they follow their instincts?

  Why does the bird work so hard in building that nest for her eggs? Why do bees risk their lives day in and day out leaving their hive to gather pollen? For some abstract, philosophical notion of “the greater good?” Of course not; it is because they are following their instincts—their built-in desires. Whether someone’s desires are to get as many likes as possible on a selfie or to serve the sick and the poor in an AIDS clinic in Calcutta, that person always and only acts because of their own desires, even if those desires are to fulfill someone else’s desires. The idea of “selflessness” or “sacrifice” as it is marketed by purveyors of religious goods and services, is often just selfishness with a mask on—another way of stroking our ego by misunderstanding or ignoring our deepest desires to be better than other people. Look at how selfless I am! This is not to say that the acts of love that we often think of as “selfless” are always really just masked, ego-driven selfishness. What I am saying is that those who truly love others are not doing it at the expense of themselves, but as a fulfillment of themselves, a melding into the flow and connectivity of love that brings lover and loved closer together.

  The fundamental separation at the heart of Christian theology between God and creation dooms the ideals of Christian love to ultimately be an untenable futility in its fullest aims. If my ego remains fundamental, I can never truly love anything but my own ego.

  If I give all I possess to the poor . . . but do not have love, I gain nothing.

  On the other hand, without the illusion of separateness, the act of loving one’s neighbor or oneself can be seen as one in the same as the act of loving God. As my sense of ego dissolves into the All, there are no transactions, no gift or giver, no one to be loved or to do the loving. There is only Love.

  The Problem of Evil

  One other problem that comes up with the myth of Christian separateness in relation to the idea that THIS is love is the “problem of evil,” which haunted me for so many years. Occupying a myth where God remained separate from his world, the sort of love that my heart felt drawn to was often overrun by the thoughts and questions in my head. I was often paralyzed with a sense of meaninglessness and futility that accompanied the questions about why this world is like it is. Why so much suffering? Why the holocaust and rape and entropy and the fact that all life has to kill in order to live? How could a good, all-powerful, and sovereign God allow such unthinkable amounts of evil and suffering to exist? How could he let this happen to us?

  And here, I think we need to hear from some of the other trees in the forest in order to tell the story of THIS is love in the fullest way possible. In other ancient stories, the assumed distance between God and his creation that makes the problem of evil feel so relevant in the Christian and post-Christian myths, is experienced as an ultimately meaningless illusion. From the perspective of ultimate unity, after all, separation is only a temporary story—part of the romance and adventure of it all and not the final word. From this higher vantage point of Oneness, the problem of evil can be seen for what it really is—a problem of language.

  As we have seen, there is no story that is fundamental to THIS. Stories are the seams of illusion that we sew into reality. They’re the imaginary grid we lay out across the movement of the All, in order to label this and that. Before these lines are drawn, there is no perspective or experience. There is just the ocean, only the dance and movement of God. This is backstage, if you will, where all the actors take off their masks.

  Here, there is no good, no evil, just THIS. Good and evil, like everything else, are born from the stories we tell.

  For instance, is a wave crashing onto a beach evil? I would imagine you would say no. But what if you found out the waves at that beach were self-aware? What if that majestic wave that crashed to its demise had seen its own end coming and had feared it? What if you found out the wave’s loved ones were now in mourning after their beloved friend, husband, and father wave had been viciously torn apart by the sand? Perhaps you might wonder what kind of ocean would allow waves to crash so violently against the shore like that?

  Why is it that we do not consider it tragic for our cells to commit suicide for the sake of our body’s survival or for our immune system to fight off viruses or virulent bacteria that have made their way into our bloodstream? Why do we not wonder about the justness of a composer who scored so many F notes yet so few F-sharps in that sonata or wail in lament as the sun disappears from our sight at the end of every day? It is because what we consider to be good or evil is always and only a matter of story.

  In most of our stories, crashing waves don’
t matter. We don’t sweat killing billions of bacteria every time we wash our hands, and giving hungry humans food is considered good because human life is considered more important than other kinds of life. But these are not the same stories we would tell if we were aliens from some other galaxy, super-intelligent bacteria, or self-aware philosopher waves staring back out at the ocean and thinking about the meaninglessness of waving.

  This is another one of those truths that is admittedly a precarious undertaking to try to constrict into words because it is possible for people with power and privilege to abuse ideas like oneness and the relativity of evil by minimizing the suffering of the people whom they oppress. It is not enlightenment for a slave owner to say, “Well I am the slave owner, but I am also the slave!” It is not enlightenment to turn an idea of fundamental unity into a perverted, watered-down version that really is masked oppression, erasure, gaslighting, or violence. To only take the abstract truth from nondual unity and to ignore the practical implications of the importance of differences is to miss the beauty of nondual realization entirely. Still, as a person who wrestled for years with the problem of evil, the stories that present God not as a Big Other, but as the Oneness expressed as All, have allowed me to see that the problem of evil that I used to wrestle with was simply the result of my assumption that God was somehow “other” than all of THIS. When the separation between my sense of self and my sense of God was erased, the question “Why does God allow evil?” became nonsensical.