Contract with the other or covenant with not-other?

I was grateful to learn this morning that my friend Lois is still with us. I still don't have anything more to say beyond the same "love you" and "thank you," but maybe it's OK not to have anything else. Maybe there isn't anything else to say.

Yesterday I was able to get my stepdaughter to watch part of the lifechurch.tv online service with me, but they lost both of us when the theme shifted to a traditional fundamentalist understanding of "wives, submit to your husbands." Perhaps we signed off too soon, and there may have been more to the message that we would have enjoyed, but I have a sore spot about the idea of taking Paul's letters as creating a new law. If someone had said to Paul, "You know those letters that you're writing to encourage the churches around the world? You're creating a new Torah, and your words will be used as scripture to bind believers to obey a new law," he would have totally flipped out. What would be the point of substituting a new Torah for the old one? The point was supposed to be grace, God's love and forgiveness instead of law, after all.

The theme of the message was about marriage as covenant rather than mere contract, as an irrevocable commitment rather than a document carefully negotiated by lawyers to allow each party a reasonable way out when the going gets rough, and that's a theme which resonates with me. The Henri Nouwen meditation for today is also about covenant, God's covenant with God: God for us, God with us, God within us. I think it's that "not-other" part which carries the most emotional weight for me.

Just as a spouse in a good, healthy and long-lasting marriage becomes "not-other," part of oneself rather than an opponent to be conquered in daily battle, so the journey of scripture and faith is also about the transition of God's relationship with us from other to not-other. In a marriage between two human beings, if it's not "mutual submission," if there is a winner and a loser, then both lose. In a spiritual journey informed by the mystical tradition, as we read and meditate upon scripture, we begin with the traditional "You're God and I'm not," with God "out there" making rules and punishing those who disobey, but that's not the place we hope to end. We hope to end in a place where God becomes a part of us and we are a part of God. Then again, mysticism and the metaphor of marriage have always gone hand in hand. :-)

PRAYER: Dearest my Lord, help me to remember today that it's not about winning, not about finding the right thing to say, not about saving anyone or changing the outcome, but it is about changing my attitude. Loving others means no longer treating them as adversaries. The more I can learn to love my husband, family and friends and accept their right to love me back, the more I can also learn to love and accept love from God.