No More Rental Love--August 4, 2020
"Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you. Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." [Deuteronomy 6:3-9]
There was a song playing in the background from the next room the other day when I was washing the dishes from dinner, and it reminded me unexpectedly of God
It's a slow croon from a wistful heart by the jazz-pop group Lake Street Dive, and the song is called "Rental Love." The opening verse describes the beginning of a relationship, one that seems tenuous and precarious from the outset. Lead singer Rachel Price sings these words:
"When we were having a good time
I got a little sentimental
The rental of your love
Was all that you gave up,
But I wanted it all... I wanted it all."
The rest of the song tracks the ups and downs of this relationship, but with that same recurring refrain coming back over and over again: "I wanted it all." Here's an honest plea from someone who wants the whole self of the one she loves, not just a sliver of a pie piece. It's a gutsy thing to sing for the imagined lover in the song, because it is so nakedly vulnerable. It is a risky thing to let down your defenses, to lower your cool enough to tell someone else, "I don't want to be just a piece of your life--I want to be involved in all of your life."
It's also a rare kind of request these days, in a culture and a time that so often teaches us to divide our selves into compartments and tells us we can give our full attention to all of them. Ours is a day that says your work life is separate from your family life, which separate from your church life, which is also separate from your circle of friends, and your hobbies are another thing, too, of course--and you can keep each of them distinct and have them all in robust fullness. What that really ends up doing, of course, is fragmenting us into shards. We end up with splintered selves, dividing some part of our energy and devotion over here, some over there with those people, and some in yet other places with a different set of needs. We aren't good at being whole people, and we are barely treading water as a collection of partial selves pulled in different directions. We are used to giving (and getting) only partial loves, fractions of devotion, when what we really most long for is to be loved completely and to give ourselves away fully as well. We don't want rental love, either--we want it the whole thing, too.
Well, like I say, this was the tune playing in the background after supper, and it made me think of God in a whole new way. I think we're used to picturing God as invulnerable, invincible, and stoic--as though God just bears everything with a stereotypically British stiff upper lip and muttering, "Keep calm and carry on" under the Almighty's breath. And maybe my own tradition's way of focusing on the grace of God which accepts us even when our faith is fickle and our love is lukewarm can lull me into thinking that God doesn't care about getting my whole self, my fullest attention, my complete love. Maybe I get complacent in thinking that God is just a provider of services rather than a lover of my soul. But then I hear these words from Deuteronomy, and I am reminded that even Jesus himself understood the greatest commandment in terms of giving our whole selves to God. Jesus quotes these words from the Torah when asked which is the greatest of all the commandments, and in a sense, it's like an ancient Israelite version of the Lake Street Dive song: "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." That is to say, we are used to giving God rental love--love on our own terms, as a transaction--and God vulnerably sings back, "I want it all."
God wants our whole selves, our whole attention, our whole neediness, our whole allegiance, and our whole love. Warts and all, beauty marks and blemishes, talents and terrors, the things we are proudest of and the things we are most afraid to let anyone else see. God wants it all.
The old medieval mystics of the church understood that. In one well-known treatise from the 14th century, known today as "The Cloud of Unknowing," the anonymous author says (as one modern rendering puts it): "God is a jealous lover. He will not share you, so don't give yourself to anyone but him. He's unwilling to work in your will unless you're willing to be entirely his, and his alone. He's not asking for your help. He's asking for you."
I don't know that I had ever thought if it that way before reading those words: God isn't asking for my help. God is asking for me. God isn't asking for a service you can provide or seeking your official skill set--God is seeking you. God isn't interested in just renting your attention and calling it love--God wants it all.
And perhaps the greatest mistake we can make in these days of transactional, quid-pro-quo thinking is to believe that we can give God just a fraction of our lives and check the "religion" requirement box off in our lives. We treat God like one of many facets to a healthy and balanced life, but one that you can't really allow to take up "too much" of your time, because, hey, we all need a social life, don't we? We end up thinking things like, "Look, I'll go to church--or watch the video--for an hour of my life on Sundays, and then forty of my hours go to work, and then I'll carve out a couple of hours for my kids, and then the rest is ME time--social life! Rectangles of Technology! Whatever I want!" In other words, we end up renting our time and love to all these things, and we end up treating God like just one customer, one renter, among many. And we imagine we can pursue contracts with each of them separately, like we are landlords letting out apartments.
But Deuteronomy's message doesn't see things that way. The God who speaks from these ancient words doesn't say, "I want to be of equal importance with your work life, your love life, and your hobbies, so as long as I get roughly the same amount of time as those, we're cool." The God who speaks in Deuteronomy calls everything else in our lives to be marked by our relationship with God--as if our heads and hands were tattooed with God's love, and our doors and gateways were graffitied with God's ways. God doesn't accept a split in ourselves between the "sacred" and the "secular," where some things have to do with God, and other things are our own business. But from the vantage point of the Scriptures, everything is spiritual--every part of our lives is lived within the deeper and wider context of our relationship with God.
That doesn't mean we can't have friends, or jobs, or hobbies, or personal lives. Of course not--as Jesus himself notes, the commandment to love God immediately spills over into the commandment to love our neighbors, which means that every other relationship in our lives becomes an expression of our love for God. But at the same time, it does mean that God reserves the right to claim more importance--and more say--in our lives than our pension plans, our wishes for the weekend, our personal dreams, and our other kinds of relationships. Sometimes we try and treat God like just a means toward us getting the other things we want in life (the ideal job, the bigger house, the perfect kids, the ideal romance, and so on), as if God will help us in the quest to divide up our loves and fragment ourselves into pieces that can be parceled out to each of those other things. Well, I'm sorry--it just ain't so. God won't help us to break our hearts up into pieces, so that we can rent each one out to a different tenant. God doesn't want a piece of you--God has been seeking the whole of you. God still is.
The bottom line is this: every other relationship or part of your life has an angle, a selfish-interest in wanting some of your time and attention and devotion and energy for their own benefit. But God doesn't love you for what you can "do" for God--the old mystic was right. God doesn't want your "help." God just wants you.
Live in that belovedness today, and let it help you (and me) to sort through the things that are worth giving our lives to... and the things that aren't worth renting ourselves out for.
God wants us all. Let us give to God all we are.
Here we are, Lord God, our full selves with strengths and weaknesses alike. Take all of who we are. We give ourselves completely and unabashedly.
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