Extravagance

I like organ music, but I have to admit that the words to the hymns don’t seem to stick in my mind. And though I’m a big fan of tradition, I also have to admit that sometimes modern versions get something right. Anyway, I went to the Saturday evening mass tonight, where we have acoustic guitar and some “contemporary” music instead of the organ and the traditional hymns. And for once, I found myself struck by a line from one of the songs, a song of praise to Christ: “…Your love is extravagant…”

After the service ended, and everyone was filing out, I sat for a moment and just… was happy. Joyful, even. And I thought, His love is extravagant. It reaches out even to touch me and fill my heart, just on this ordinary Saturday evening; it reminds me that He was there with us in our worship and is with me still. Extravagant. There’s something special about that word, something that cuts right to the heart of a question I’d been thinking about earlier in the day: Why are we, as a culture, so suspicious of happiness?

Wait a second. You might point out that our government is supposedly based on the right to pursue happiness. People are all committed to living the American Dream, which presumably includes being happy. And we’re constantly bombarded with media suggestions on what will make us happy: if we look younger, feel fitter, have larger houses and cars, dress more fashionably, know more people, and have more sex, we should be happier, right? The pursuit of all these things is, in fact, glorified.

So, OK, we can be happy about getting things. Not about taking pleasure in the things we have, mind you, but in getting more things and better, fancier things. I can tell my co-workers about my new condo and they’ll share my excitement, but only at the beginning; two months or a year from now, they’ll find it odd if I tell them about how thrilled I am to sit in the sunshine with my coffee and look at the flowers outside my window.

Some kinds of happiness are suspect right from the start. I wouldn’t even think to tell my co-workers about how it felt to sit in the little chapel tonight and feel my heart full of love for Him who died for me. Not long ago I was on the other side of this divide, and I know perfectly well how I’d have reacted if someone came up to me with a comment like that. Not sympathetically, I have to admit. At the very least, I’d have thought it in poor taste to get actually, you know, emotional about that kind of thing even if you did believe it.

What about family? We love family here in America, right? Well… kind of. We glorify romantic love, the first flush of passion, and neglect the steady glow. (And by doing so, in fact, we make it harder, in this culture, to keep a relationship going). We celebrate the birth of a child, but tend to ignore the harder, day-to-day challenge of raising children to be good young men and women.

What is it that makes some kinds of happiness culturally OK, and others not?

I suspect that we’re only comfortable with a certain category of happiness sources: the ephemeral ones. We are addicted to change, and we have equated change with all the positive values that once went with tradition. (Not that tradition doesn’t have its own problems, but the phrase “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” comes to mind.) It is at the least unfashionable, if not actively un-American, to find joy in being and doing, rather than having.

We’re also a very cynical culture, and that cynicism is expressed in a discomfort with total commitment to anything. Throwing yourself into the emotion of love, of worship, of just plain happiness – I mean, how… cheesy, right? How trite, how unsophisticated. Think of how we tend to describe films and books that depict love and happiness with an open heart. “Wholesome,” we say, conscious of the scare quotes. Great for the kids, but definitely not what the grown-ups are interested in. We wink at each other to signal that we know better, that we know love is blind, heroes are flawed, hope is in vain, people are just in it for themselves. How much more sophisticated, urbane, polished, acceptable it is to treat any subject with irony and cynicism.

Because in irony you distance yourself. You’re not involved; in fact, you’re specifically setting yourself apart (and above) “those people” who are experiencing something as trite and shopworn as actual, unabashed emotional response.

Irony is safe. You can’t be touched; therefore, you can’t get hurt. And if you can manage to poison the wellspring of simple love and joy, you don’t have to feel bad for not having them, because you can claim they’re not worth having any more.

Love means making yourself vulnerable… and we’re not really big on weakness, in this culture, are we? We’re certainly terrified of looking old or weak, of not being able to “perform” (in many different contexts). Maybe that’s why casual sex is so big these days, why “hooking up” has become the new way for college students to relate to the opposite sex. If you don’t make any emotional connection, there’s no bond to be broken in the first place. And if ordinary human love means opening up yourself, then how much more vulnerable would we have to be in order to experience total love? Total love means total vulnerability; accepting that what we are being offered is so much more than what we can give in response that it overwhelms us.

That, in fact, Christ’s love for us is “extravagant.” Which takes us right back to where we started.

Extravagant. Infinitely more than we deserve. More than we can handle; more than we can take in; more than we can even conceive of. A love so persistent that it never gives up trying to find a way to light a spark in every human heart. A love so exuberant that it springs to life with equal strength in every heart that opens to it. A love so strong that it shakes us to our bones with just a glimpse of it; so strong that we’ll really need to be remade into new creatures with the capacity to take in this extravagant love.

There’s a lot of remaking that had to happen with me to even get me to this point, the point at which I can even begin to respond to that extravagant love. Experiencing God’s renewing work in real time is disconcerting, and frankly I don’t pretend to know half of what’s going on in myself these days. It’s like coming home each day to find subtle changes in the placement of the furniture in your house…. the sofa moved a few inches, some books not where you thought they were… and occasionally discovering that a room has been totally redecorated while you weren’t paying attention.

God’s been doing a lot of furniture moving and redesign lately. I’m not even sure what some of the changes are, but one of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot more sunshine around the place than there used to be. What used to be just occasional rays of light breaking through the clouds is turning into a steadier and brighter glow, and that just about knocks me out.

I keep finding out that God is so much more than I expect – more real, to begin with (hah!), more active in my life, more merciful. More loving. “That’s the great thing about walking in the Christian life,” my priest told me the other day. “It just keeps getting better.”

I’m getting the sense that he’s right.

Now that’s an extravagant love: to start like this, and… there’s more?

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