Acting out

The subject of the week this week in TS501 is.. epistemology: the study of knowing. How do we know what we know? And what, if anything, can we know?

"The traditional model of knowledge that we have inherited from the Greeks, that extends through millenia down to us, typically divorces knowing from doing. It is possible to think about something in abstraction from acting on it. While there are times in our experience when it is useful to make this distinction, the distinction has the adverse effect of leading us to think of action as mindless and mind as actionless. Knowledge, we are led to say, is to be had even if it does not shape our behavior."

"On the other hand, ... someone can show you that he or she cares about you by sending you flowers, inviting you into his or her home, silently stroking your shoulder as you cry."

"Knowing is, at its heart, an act. To act is to live, [to] embody, knowledge. The act of knowing is a profoundly human one. And it is a struggle toward coherence."

----- Esther Meek, Longing to Know



The subject of the week in church yesterday was the "love test" in 1 John 2:7-11. The gist of it is.. how do we know love? By what it says and does. And it's not just John, the apostle of love - Jesus taught the same thing (as did James in his letter.) Our words and actions reveal what's in our hearts. It seemed to tie in with the "knowing" idea for TS501 somehow.. to know something is to experience it: act it, embody it, live it, as Meek says.

We can say that we *know* someone loves us. But if they don't act on that love, don't express it to us in ways we can perceive with our senses, doesn't thinking about unexpressed love in our heads also call for that love to *show* itself, to demonstrate its existence in reality? Don't we long to *feel* it from them, as well as *know* it exists? As humans, we are not a walking dichotomy of feeling and reason, as if the right and left sides of our brains had an impenetrable wall between them - we are an integrated whole.

If I love someone, and don't tell them so with my words, show them so by my actions.. am I not divorcing feeling from reason, thought from action, denying my basic humanness, and essentially dis-integrating the wholeness of the love I have for them? What good is the knowledge of love without the experience of it? If I am human, I also *experience* that which I know, or.. I may not really *know* it at all, according to Meek.

Does God love us this way? Not just thinking about it, but acting on it? It seems that He's told us He loves us with His words.. and shown it by His actions. It's what's embodied in the liturgy: hearing His Word, remembering His Action.

And so.. how do we love God? "...with all your heart and soul and mind and strength." Like that? With the whole of ourselves, not just with an unlived concept in our heads? Is what He wants of us?

"...and your neighbor as yourself..." Is that also to be done with our heart and soul and mind and strength? Not just thinking about it, but acting on it?

I guess these are rhetorical questions; I hope the answers are obvious.
(to me as well as to everyone else.. I know I need reminding of this.)



And so if I ask you: "do you really love me?", you may say "yes!", but how will I *know* that your 'yes' is true?

(pause here for obvious answer..)



Somehow I can hear Jesus asking this of Peter, while taking steps to reconcile with him after all that happened: Peter's trust-breaking lies, the crucifixion, the resurrection:

"Simon, do you love me?"
... Lord, you know I do.
"Feed my sheep."

(repeat as needed, until Peter gets it.. and sees the painful irony)



I think God is saying: intellectual assent is not enough. If you think it, then act on it. Put legs and arms and hands and lips on your beliefs. Show what you believe, what you think is true, with your words and your actions, even if it costs you. Costs you in your checkbook, your calendar, your freedom.. and your heart. It's what Jesus taught, and how he lived.

That combination of thought and action represents whole, healthy humanness, *and* it's the way God made us: to think.. and act out what we think. He set the pattern, showed us how.



(note to self: you would do well to take this to heart more often.)