If Lent is a season in which we are called to consider "What is it mean to be a faithful disciple of Jesus" then we must consider, at some point, the Greatest Commandment.
1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.
According to Jesus, in multiple Gospels though I'm in Mark 12 for this one, the second is like it.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Anyone with a Sunday School grade level can recite that from rote memory, but when it comes to understanding it...at least in my case, not so much.
How in the world is loving my neighbor in the same manner as I love myself anywhere CLOSE to loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength? It's something that I take on Faith (with a capital F, please note, which indicates the concept is too large for me to get a grapple on at the moment) because I don't understand it. Feel free to comment down below and help me wrestle with it.
Taking it on Faith I tackle the more manageable second one. And I've been crap at it. I used to suffer from a fairly significant Social Anxiety. I wouldn't dare call it "severe" merely because I have no basis for comparison. It wasn't Anxiety in the way I think most people feel anxiety, which is a physical response with no corresponding logic to it. Again, I haven't studied anxiety, so if I'm incorrect feel free to correct me in the comments below. I've always had fairly logical reasons for my anxiety, or so I've believed.
When I meet a person I always have a certain amount of awkwardness because I recognize that I'm nothing to whoever I meet. I'm a face without a name until I'm introduced, and who the heck am I to assume anything let alone that I have a right to their time let alone their consideration? Sometimes I feel the same way about my blogs, but I figure you can just close them if you don't want them and be on your merry way. I tend to feel that I don't even have a right to introduce myself to someone, and when others have introduced me I have felt like that was some sort of an imposition. But, usually once a conversation begins even then I'm at a loss. I'm not a very small talk type person. I've never been able to pull off the "Oh...so, uh...are you originally from here?" type conversation. It's awkward, I sound awkward, and it feels like I'm really not interested, struggling for something so the other person who started talking to me doesn't feel rejected. And it sounds like that because I really feel that way. If I could skip the awkward "getting to know you" bit and launch into the in depth struggling with our human and spiritual selves philosophical sort of conversation I would. That's the territory I feel the most at home in. But this, "Oh gee...that Nor'easter we got the other day...what did ya think of that?" is painful. Then you search around trying to find something in common and people always go to Sports. I know why they go to sports...but I am not a sports guy. Even in my favorite sport of Soccer I don't much like talking about it. And that's why I wear Fandom shirts.
Fandom shirts (currently wearing my Doctor Who shirt with the glow-in-the-dark Weeping Angels) let me bypass all of that...generally. One of the Small Group studies I went to I spent 8 agonizing weeks going wearing a different shirt and got no bites. It was a couples thing with the guys but me were all swollen armed "Guys Guys", talking manliness, outdoors, trucks, and the like. I wore Doctor Who shirts, Sherlock shirts, video game shirts, and in a last ditch (and perennially futile effort) I wore an Edgar Allen Poe shirt with a quote from "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" and one of the ladies there said the quote sounded romantic.
I'm just not a "reacher-out-er". I figure that if we are meant to be friends then it's going to happen, and even THEN I have anxiety. My past is a long history of thinking that each friendship is actually more important to the other person than it actually ends up being. And that hurts. I was friends for two years with someone and our wives were good friends. It's such a trite story where the friend holds a party...I didn't get an invite...then one of the other friends casually remarks that "Yeah, it was a great party. All his friends were there." and I realize that I've been just an acquaintance all this time and I thought I was a friend. It has happened in more instances than I can actually count on my hands, fingers and toes. And it hurts. It hurts a lot. It doesn't just cut, it shreds. That shredding makes a person more than a little gun shy when it comes to forging friendships and putting yourself out there. I've been fortunate to have one person in my life who is such a good friend that when we meet up it's like we never parted (even when it was ten years apart) or I would give up on the whole "having friends thing".
All that to say that I have anxiety because I've been damaged, not some chemical imbalance...which would be far worse I agree.
And, all that to get back to what I realized about our second greatest commandment.
"Oh well...get out there anyway."
Satori is a Zen concept that indicates a sudden realization that feels like getting smacked upside the head with a brick spiritually. I had that.
Loving your neighbor is about loving whoever happens to be next to you at the time. Loving him/her as yourself means treating them precisely how you would want to be treated. For me, that means getting over my anxiety so that I can welcome them into my life as warmly and completely as I would actually want to be on the receiving end of. I need to be treating whoever I meet with precisely the same love and care as my one completely steadfast friend did when they met me. Yes, I've been hurt. Yes, I have anxiety to deal with. However, I'm in danger of turning into exactly what hurt me. If I hold my hurt I'll make it awkward for others, I'll love at a distance, I'll not invite someone, etc. The only way to not become what hurt me to someone else is to let go, rely on Jesus to do what He has commanded, and love with His love. It's scary, but I'm pretty sure He can accomplish it in me when He has already commanded it of me.
It may seem a little thing now that I've pushed it outside of myself for you to see, but I'm a bit bigger on the inside for the realization.
Pax,
W
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