What Matters Most: How We Got the Point but Missed the Person by Leonard Sweet

Author:Leonard Sweet [Sweet, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307730589
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE “OTHER” KIND

God’s invitation to us isn’t, “Shut up and listen!” but, “Walk with me and help me serve others.” God’s greatest desire is to love us so that we can love God and others. God’s greatest hope is that we will join God in a relationship that turns others around, that turns people who are “accidents waiting to happen” into “people who make things happen.”

“I want final say and sway in your life,” God says, “but talk to me, wrestle with me, be my friend as we wake up this world with some really good news.”

Christian mystic Leanne Payne says faith is walking alongside God. But it’s so much easier just to walk alongside myself. Walking alongside Jesus demands that I make others the focus of my relationship with the divine. In contrast, when I am the focus of my relationship with God, then I can relax and just concentrate on attending to my own needs. It’s so much simpler when others aren’t involved.

At the memorial service for country singer June Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne celebrated her stepmother as someone who knew only two kinds of people: “Those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know … and loved.”2 The purpose of love is to love others. My guess for the open-sesame question at the Pearly Gates? “Who have you brought with you?”

Holocaust survivor and philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas calls the question of the “other” and the claim “others” make in our lives the religious question. Lévinas upsets the philosophical applecart by insisting that ethics, not metaphysics, is the “first” philosophy. There is something more fundamental than “being.” That is “being in relationship.”3

The metaphor that Lévinas used for the “other” is the “face” (le visage). When we insist on integrating “otherness” into our own preconceptions and preexistent categories, we “deface” the other, demean his or her integrity, and diminish that person’s contribution to our understanding of the world. We are not called to fit someone else into our own story, but to encounter and experience the ways that God is in the other person’s story. Only in a listening relationship can the other be truly “faced” and not “defaced.” The critical test of any faith thus becomes “does it make space for otherness?”5

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