There’s been a fascinating debate going on between JD Vance and a former British MP Rory Stewart about the Christian concept of love. Vance says that one should first take care of one’s family, then one’s friends, then the community, and so on. Whoever is closest to you comes first in the hierarchy of caring.
Stewart disagreed that there should be such a hierarchy. Christian love, he said, should be borderless and flat. You should love a sufferer on the other side of the world exactly as you love your own child.
I’m not a theologian, and my perspective is based not on profound readings of Church authorities but on what I observe. During service, fellowship meals, prayer circle, and confession, the priest always returns you from the far-flung to the immediate and reminds you to be humble. Discussions of world problems are very discouraged. The message is, “work on making yourself a little better, strengthen your family, do something for your parish family. Do what’s real instead of flattering your hubris.” I’ve seen our extremely gentle priest cut people down pretty abruptly when they started going on about intractable problems outside the immediate.
Loving faraway strangers is extremely easy because they aren’t annoying. If you never meet a person, they can’t get on your nerves. Loving the actual relatives, neighbors and coworkers is very hard because they get daily opportunities to drive you nuts and use those opportunities eagerly. I donate to charitable faraway causes very gladly and often. But that’s extremely easy in comparison to the effort it takes not to retaliate against a really annoying person at work.
Seraphim of Sarov, one of our greatest saints, said, “save yourself, and thousands will be saved around you”. He also said, “establish yourself in God, and then you’ll be helpful to others.” People don’t work on improving themselves because hubris blinds them. Every tiny victory over our ingrained tendency to act shitty is precious but it’s hard. It’s so much easier to buy an indulgence and consider oneself a good person.
An understanding of how this works can only come from actual religious practice. Everything in church is about the practice of humility. And that’s wonderful because we suffer from overinflated egos that know no boundaries and expand in a boundary-deprived fashion. The rise in mental illness we keep hearing about is exactly this, the ego that tries to subsume the world because it doesn’t know there’s a place it should actually stop. People who are not religious meditate, do gratitude journals and pursue grounding practices precisely for this purpose. Grounding yourself in the immediate is such an instantaneous relief to an overblown, overheated ego.
So yes, we could all do with a bit more humility and a bit less grandiosity.
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