Journal of Sacred Work

36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world…37…Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.
John 18:36,37

   Hard as it is to live truth, it may be even harder to live love. Is there a difference between living truth and living love? The answer can seem confusing.

   Imagine you are an Auschwitz prisoner in 1944 – something perhaps impossible to contemplate but powerful as an illustration of the most dire circumstances. You watch as a starving fellow prisoner steals a piece of bread while a guard’s back is turned. The guard whirls, aims a gun at the prisoner and shouts at you, "did you see #10489 steal some bread?" The truth is that you did. Should you tell the truth when you know the guard will beat your fellow prisoner? Or should you tell a truth that comes from God, a truth which tells you that love calls for compassion…   

   The world’s truth is often a harsh mistress. Love may call us to stay silent or to lie.
   Jesus repeatedly told his followers to ignore many of the rules of
the world and instead listen to the voice of God as it came through
him. The truth, for us, is often that we want the world’s things for
ourselves and don’t want to share with others. Love calls us to share.
   The world often shouts at us to defeat our competitors. Jesus’ truth, the truth he brought to us from another world, is that we should yield to the legitimate needs of others.
   How does Jesus’ truth inform us as care givers? I have often listened to health care leaders talk of the need to "beat the competition" and I have written about the foolishness of this kind of thinking in other meditations. Most hospitals and charities have a legitimate right to exist. Why should a non profit organization try to defeat another non profit? Isn’t the call of Christian love that we listen to God’s call for love and not hostility?
   Does this mean that we should quit trying to succeed? Of course not. There is a vast difference between a charity that is trying to improve and a charity obsessed with defeating another charity. The call of God is that we live love, not fear – that we seek to help others, not to destroy them.
   I have heard people justify questionable behaviors by citing the laws of humans when they know that God’s law says otherwise. A common example existed in the south in the 1950s when the laws of many states instructed those who happen to have been born with white skin to discriminate against those born with black skin. For Civil Rights leaders, this meant suffering the punishment of men in order to follow the teaching of Jesus.
   Everyday care givers are asked to follow rules which defeat love, compassion and even common sense. Rules may be used to drive visitors from the bed of sick and lonely patients because "visiting hours are over." Policies may be used to hold back the use of a wheelchair to a patient suffering outside an ER door because the rule says, "no wheelchairs outside."
   The voice of the world is loud, omnipresent, and deeply seductive. The important question is not only what is "legal" but also what is ethical.
   St. Augustine described the world as The City of Man and contrasted it with The City of God. The voice of God can be difficult to hear if our ear is tuned only to the sounds of The City of Man. Yet it God’s voice we must know and heed. And we hear that voice in the love that lives between the laws.

As T.S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets:

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the
   stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)

 It may cost us "everything" of our worldly goods to listen to God’s voice. And it may cost us much more if if we listen only to the voice of the world.