Pearl S. Buck once wrote, “The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His (sic) heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His (sic) mind shrinks away if he (sic) hears only the echoes of his (sic) own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. ”

She echoed the Hebrew scripture “It is not good for man to be alone” and the words from Jesus in John’s gospel for today: “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.”

But which is the true vine? It’s not always so easy to tell. And how can we assess the heart of a politely cheerful leader?

In today’s complex world there are many options for investing one’s fidelity. Catholic people continue to be both mystified and exasperated for example, by the Vatican’s oppressive treatment of American Women Religious for their lagging in supprot of official Vatican position and prefeerring to work exhaustively for world peace and the justice it requires. Top leadership says one thing, and our hearts say another.

As Maureen Dowd blogged recently, “The pope needs what we all got from the nuns, a good crack across the knuckles.”

How do public leaders fall so far from empathic understanding? Do they not even recognize agape when they see it?

The gospel offers a criterion for discernment between the true vine and those decrepid ones hanging about on abandoned mansions. Love. Heart. Genuine care, a window almost completely neglected by society and church leadership.

That criteria simpolifies the answer. Which is most loving, striving for peace and justice it requires, or adherence to regulation about issues of sexuality that mostly unnerve a celibate leadership?

Over-focus on regulation has long been the bane of true worship and interpersonal care of one another among people. While you are gnashing about over law and policy you are not connecting with the heart. Jesus noticed that. You are likely not even accessing the sliver of empathy it takes to be any kind of spiritual leader.

The heart is the only criteria of discernment given here,not political correctness nor even thinking. “Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence in God and receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.”

How does one lead with heart? And how can one lead well without it? Indeed, can one even find one’s own heart once it is covered by layers of repetitive stubborn intellectualizing that pass for thinking?

The heart looks intuitively for what another person is feeling. It does so relentlessly, seeking ways to understand and convey that understanding so that the other will feel understood as often as possible. It is the way to interpersonal care in all kinds of relationships. It is not rocket science, and ceertianly not innovative. But in its simplicity empathy in-the-moment is so easily neglected.

It is the constant project of lovers, both men and women, in their efforts to feed the “we” that is trying to grow between them.

Such heart consciousness is easily spurned in public service. It is easier to focus on thinking, regulation, written contract, and shaping political impressions.

What reminds us of the need for empathy most often is the heart felt warmth we experience for those with whom we are intimate–friends, lovers, spouses, children, and sometimes siblings and parents. Notice all of those are relationships that center on the two person configuration of sexuality–except friendship.

Celibate leaders need to be very good at friendship in order to stay emotionally healthy and even human, as Sontag wrote.

The spiritual skills of maintaining close relationships need one day to become criteria for leadership in all walks of life. Testing a person’s ability to love romantically, at least for some extended periods of time, will offer a new window into the heart relational ability of any applicant for leadership. Heartfelt witness statements by close friends, conveyed publicly for the entire world to see, will provide another.

For the most part however, such discernment needs to take place in small groups of peers, lead by experts in intimate relationships.

We will never prevent all John Edwards, Arnold Schwartznegers and Elliot Spitzers from attaining high office. But in the process of testing out aspiring leaders’ relationships of the heart, we may guide them to greater maturity in the process.

Could the escapades of Bill Clinton and the pedophile priests have been curtailed with such a well designed, small group encounter? Some of them could. But facing a small group of peers in confidential interchange regarding their loving connections, and hearing from the people close to them in the same arena, would certainly challenge them to take greater cognizance of the implications of spurning good sense while in a place of leadership.

Celibate religious leaders have an even greater challenge than political ones. To what degree have they remained undeveloped emotionally by closing off from the intimate loving efforts that eventually challenge all romantic lovers to the core?

Where are the tests and arenas of assessing empathy that can open for us these windows into aspiring leaders’ souls so we can rescue them from the pockets of excessive secrecy that defeat their growing up?

Gordon J Hilsman, D. Min.
Author of Intimate Spirituality

ghilsman@gmail.com
253-370-3327

My wife and I saw The Hunger Games movie this week, the first of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy to be put to film. It engages the imagination with its portrayal of four relatively distinct kinds of love capable of enriching every life. Maybe its compelling way of illustrating the power of love is what propelled it to record setting popularity in its first weeks at the box office.

Katniss

Affection: the fondness that arises from familiarity, as between family members. Katniss’s sisterly love for her younger sibling Prim, is strong enough for Kat to risk her own life in volunteering for the death game to protect the 12 year old Prim from almost certain death. Like the good shepherd of today’s gospel reading who “lays down his life for the sheep”, her altruistic concern captures the imagination of even the decadent, self-absorbed elite of that futuristic society.

Agape: love that brings forth care for even a stranger, regardless of the circumstances. Fourteen year old Rue’s selfless love of Katniss as she allies with her against ruthless peers during a crucial moment in the games, seems to come from nowhere to help her new friend’s chances of success. Friendship is like that. It is at least half luck, (or grace to use a theological word), but can become so rich and sustaining that it comprises much of the satisfaction of human living.

Philia or Friendship: the strong bond that is maintained by sharing common interests, activites, points of view or missions. Is the motivation behind Rue’s alliance with Kastniss what is called agape love of the stranger? Or is it the affection one feels for a heroic person who inspires you with her solid and compelling humanness? Or is it merely the delightful energy of new friendship? Or all thee?

Rue seems to have incorporated deeply into herself the words of St. John, sometimes called the love evangelist, that were read in churches today, ” Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” Rue loves uncommonly, as a sister who relaizes we are all loved sumptuously by The Creator. She epitomizes the Gift of Wisdom called Benignity.

Eros: The falling-in-love driven by the natural need for deeply emotional companionship and the energy of sexuality. Katniss’s affections for her hunting partner Gale, and budding romantic feelings for her games colleague, Peeta, collide as both of the young men fall for her and Peeta ignites jealousy in Gale. The delightful, and painful messiness of erotic love shows up even in the treacherous warlike turmoil of the bestially deadly game.

Young love erupts eternally and injects hope into virtually everyone in one era of life or another. As my mother (and many others too I bet) always said, “love makes the world go ’round.” Can Eros not be of God? Indeed, is it not, like the other two, the face of God Herself?

The larger theme of coercion and manipulation drives the story’s action however. . The many ways in which the decadent leadership controls, forces, and seduces the residents of its twelve distant regions parallels the manipulative relationships that can easily emerge between partners of love relationships as well. Love is sharply juxtaposed with its opposite in this movie, as it is in romance. By the time a romantic relationship sinks in breakup or divorce, a great deal of manipulation and coercion has taken place that waas never intended to be a part of the intimate loving.

Pleasure means power. Shared pleasure, as built into humanity with our two-person configuration of reproductive motivation, means powerful influence on our love partners is possible. Lovers often get quite deep into that morass before they realize just how hurtful they are being to one another.

Manipulation is using another person’s feelings to get something you want for yourself. The mutual pleasuring of sexuality provides more than enough opportunity to complain, withhold, criticize, withdraw, threaten subtly or overtly, promise, defend, and explain rather than love and learn how.

Transactional analysis creator Eric Bern defined interpersonal games as repetitive interactions designed unconsciously to make us feel a little better by making another person feel worse. Our natural hunger for loveg can go far astray into hurtful manipulation of one we once loved deeply.

“I’ll love you physically if you change to be more like I want you to be” is a game called Dog House

“I’ll talk to you if you give me my way” is a game called Silent Storm.

Other common games could be called Here’s what you deserve. 

Read my mind or you’ll regret it. and

You always….You never…. and

You Don’t you dare!

There are many more.

Good Shepherd Sunday, April 29 this year, often calls to task the Church’s leadership as to whether or not they “hold the people in their hearts” when they make decisions. But it can come closer to home for most of us as we wonder how good our shepherding of one another in ongoing romantic love has been. How daily fresh, how gamey.

Intense and relentless hunger for love is inextricable from our humanness. Like our need for food it is fulfilled only for brief periods of time in ordinary human lives. Perhaps it is so deeply ingrained in humanity in order to teach us painfully, how to give, invest, tolerate, accept, offer grace and share — in other words to grow up into reasonably mature human beings.

May the millions of readers and viewers of The Hunger Games Trilogy move a bit towards that goal by pondering the mysteries of human loving of all kinds. The humanity of the future will require people who have done that.

Gordon J Hilsman, author of
Intimate Spirituality
ghilsman@gmail.com