The angel and the beast

The French have a saying which states that whoever wants to be an angel, ends up being a beast. I think there’s some truth in it, but maybe I should start with an example: it is easy enough to say “alright then, the Great Commission, I’m going to go out and visit people at the local hospital”. But if one jumps into this kind of thing without reflexivity, it can turn nasty: you could end up burning out, or even resenting the people you visit in that way – and down at the bottom, cases of outright abuses by primary caretakers are not unheard of.

I’ve been having this question of “deliberativeness” at the back of my mind for a while, mainly because the notion is almost foreign to a good friend of mine. See, for my part I want to be “faithful”, and to obey Jesus’ commandments and all that. I wouldn’t mind re-enacting a little St Francis jig in the 21st century. I wish I was surrounded by people who were really good at being faithful and could socialise me into it, and turn me into a pretty serious little fighter.

But that motivation is full of shit, because the other person, the one I would “reach out to”, is not even part of the picture. Maybe they’d enter the picture for the whole of five minutes, when Cecile hands out a fresh-out-of-the-oven brioche to a couple of starving kids. And “they looked so happy”, and “they gave us a hug”, yeah. You see sometime the recipients are quite graceful: they let you feel like you’re a nice person. Sometime they’re grumpy because they know you don’t really care. And that’s okay, they don’t really care for you either. There we are.

So now I’m wary, wary of those churches that go hand out bread rolls in some difficult neighbourhood on Saturday morning thinking they’re feeding the hungry. See there’s a catch. Most of the time, the people weren’t truly hungry for food –other options do exist- but they might have been hungry for friendship. Friendship, now what? They’re weird, they’re fucked up, they’re dependent, they’ve got issues, they don’t share my taste in music and there’s no way I’m letting them near the kids.

So drop it, I tell myself. Drop that shitty motivation from the pit of hell. There is only one skill I need, that of falling in love, over and over again, with pretty much everyone. I mean falling in love. And let that stupid deliberativeness dissolve into thin air like the stinky fart that it is.

There’s a line in Bonhoeffer in which he wryly states that you can never really know if you’re being a Christian: the minute you love your enemies, they’re not enemies anymore, so it doesn’t feel very heroic. The minute you fall in love with people, you’re not “feeding the hungry” anymore, you’re hanging out with your buddies and even the pagans do the same. If faithfulness doesn’t permanently elude you, you’re just not living on the right edge.

This said, if I heard about a famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would simply forget about "relationship" for a while and just write a cheque to a really efficient organisation. This is not an either/or.