Scanning for Love

“... I realized that I had been seeing large human problems in a statistical model: percentages of Gross National Product, average annual income, mortality rate, doctors-per-thousand of population.  

Love, however, is not statistical; we can never precisely calculate the greatest possible good to apply equally to the world’s poor and needy. 

We can only seek out one person, and then another, and then another, as objects for God’s love.”

Philip Yancey on “Statistical Love”

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Dear Alex,

Love is an illusion sometimes.  

We love to be loved but we shun the cost and implication.  We love food, vacation and shopping though they seem to inflate rather than gratify our visceral appetite for more.  I cannot get enough of the thrills, and the thrills have soon trilled in boredom: marginal utility, a gem in learning from my economics class.  

Last Summer, I used up my 2 previous years of vacation savings to take my daughter to her dream destination.  Two and three summers ago, I skipped my own vacation to shuffle more resources to realize more fantasies for my family.  Statistically speaking, these endeavors were exorbitant in size and sentiment.  In truth, empty calories. 

If I love me, then I can begin to love another.  So I am going to first gift myself something more enduring than a thrill.  I need to look at love eye to eye, throat in gut.  I do not blink to miss it.  A visage without the facade.  A thing I can keep and grow, filling up the hollow spots of past abandoned things in deep recesses of the mind, in the pit of heart.  No illusion.  

Yesterday night. the rain spared no mercy.  The land yielded, drank it all, bloated and burped in vile pleasure.  The rain did not stop a few souls from gathering in a small place at a rather bad part of town.  It was my first time present there - a place of secret needs in crisis.  I shadowed volunteering counselors with beautiful strangers in invisible convulsions.  Into a dark jungle to make peace with unpeaceable creatures.    

This morning after, I have not left the jungle.  Look at love and see more grief than comfort, fatter holes than fixes, deeper rejection than embrace.  There it is - in potholes and venom, the look of love.  

Yours, Kate 

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Dear Kate,

Thanks for sharing the Yancey article.  I think everybody should read it in full.

"How can we justify training a (seeing-eye) dog for one American blind person when the same money would prevent blindness in eight hundred people elsewhere?"  Yancey quoted Peter Singer, "the world’s most influential living philosopher."

I wonder if Singer has an app in his phone to help him practice his utilitarian ethics, scanning every face he sees to determine in the scheme of bigger causes the being's "face-value"--or more like, disposability.  I also wonder for every dollar we save not training a seeing-eye dog how much of that would end up going to more valuable initiatives instead of bubble tea or, for that matter, useless apps.

If I sounded cynical it's only because what Singer proposes is all too real.  We might not wave a membership card to flaunt our subscription to Singer's moral philosophy, but we find it hard to deny its appeal and practicality.

And for that practice it we do.  Do we not "scan" with our eyes for "value" everywhere we look, among people and on screen, pursue and prize what we find useful, discount and dismiss what we would rather not be in our way of pursuit?

Everyone leads a different life.  I am only speaking for myself, a vision I saw when I visited residents in a long term care home.  We talk about health care all the time, comparing the pros and cons of different systems, mostly complaining about what we don't have or need to endure.

What we don't say is, if every able body is to give only one out of the 168 God-given hours every week to provide health care to those in need, something as simple as talking to them, acknowledging their human value even when--especially when--there seems none to be found, what sort of heaven-on-earth "care system" we would have in our neighborhood.  It might even cure ourselves of our value-scanning eye disease.

Of course I am not saying this is going to solve our "health care crisis" (our life will always be in crisis when we contract out our responsibility to live a good life and think someone else has the duty to fix what I have the right to break), and I am not even saying everyone should do what I think is important.

What I want to say is our God is a creative God, and he is calling us to live our creative best to participate in the re-creation of his good but now broken Creation that God loves then and loves still, no diminishing utility here.  This means we are truly repenting of our rebellious ways, reclaiming our lost image-bearing vocation to reflect God's glory, and now yearning for what God yearns for, living for what God himself did die for.

Yes, this will involve value-judgement, and sometimes the sort that Singer proposes.  But one must be wary of brilliant ideas.  You know an idea is brilliant when the idealist can't point out to you the particular beneficiary of his brilliance.  The faces of the "eight hundred people elsewhere," what do they look like?

Seeing-eye dog, I saw one, in training, on a very crowded light rail cabin, right beside me, last week.  A colleague tells me almost once a day how he hates public transit, even though he understandably is not taking any.  I pulled out my phone and texted him what I saw: the joyful seriousness on the face of the trainer, the kibbles in her hand, the young dog's disciplined impatience, all calls for me to be a better person.  If I didn't tell someone I thought I was going to cry.

Yours, Alex