The One Law of the Spirit

Introduction

One or many?

Old Testament speaks about the Law of Moses in the singular. Yet rabbinical tradition piled up an immense accretion of 613 majors laws (in the plural), plus a whole constellation of minor laws that were beyond count. The scribes and Pharisees allude to that constellation in the many scoldings they dish out to Jesus: “How come you do not carefully wash your hands when you come in from the market place? How come you do not scrupulously pay tithes on mint, cumin, and dill in your gardens? How come you don’t observe the right manner of washing cups, bowls and copper kettles?” (Mt 23^rd chapter). We in the New Testament shouldn’t criticize. In the church we too claimed to have our ”one great Law,” and yet we too had our 613 plus laws. We too sometimes sound like the scribes and the Pharisees: “How come we don’t say Mass in Latin? How come lay people can touch the Eucharist? How come we can eat meat on Friday? How come women are allowed in the sanctuary now? How come you skipped the ‘credo` at Mass today?”

In his gospel John has Jesus saying, "You will live in my love if you keep my commandments (plural)." And in the very next breath Jesus says, "This is my commandment (singular): Love one another as I have loved you" (Jn 15:10‑12). How many laws or commandments are there? One or many? It’s an old question but let’s try to speak of it in a new way.

The one Law of our creation:

In our conception and birth into the world as a human being, God writes one sole solitary Law or Commandment into all of us: “Thou shalt be the human being you were created to be.” That is to say, “Thou shalt be compassionate, merciful, generous, self‑ sacrificing, sensitive, unselfish, thoughtful, non‑violent, gentle.” “Thou shalt be the human being you were created to be” -- call it the “the Law of our creation.”

That one solitary Law is written with a capital L. And it is written not upon paper or stone but upon the human heart and spirit. It is therefore a spiritual Law. Sometimes it is called the "Law of the Spirit" or the "Law of Love" or the "Law of Christ." That Law is written upon every human heart and spirit in its creation. Moslems, Jews, and Christians all have one and the same solitary Law or Commandment written upon them: “Thou shalt be the human being you were created to be.”

And here we come to the question of number: When that one capital L Law of the Spirit is alive and well within us, it is so sufficient in itself that it needs absolutely no other law or laws (with a small l). It doesn’t need 613 laws. Because that one Law of the Spirit, when alive and well, compels us to do absolutely everything and infinitely more than what 613 other laws could possibly ask of us.

Examples of the one Law

//It was the capital ”L” Law, the Law of her creation, alive and well in her, that compelled Mother Theresa to pick up discarded human beings from the streets of Calcutta. She needed no other laws. She had no other laws. In fact, there were no other laws that could have possibly compelled her to do more or to do better than she did. True enough, it was the humanity in those human beings, dying by the wayside, that called mother Theresa to them. But it was first of all the humanity in her, alive and well, that saw them there in the first place, and that summoned her to them.

//It was the capital “L” Law, the Law of his creation to be the human being he was created to be, it was that Law alive and well in him, that summoned Aaron Feuerstein to do what he did when his fabric mill in Methuen, Mass. burned down a few days before Christmas in 1995. This Jewish CEO and owner of the mill did not take the insurance money and run. Instead he held on to all his 2000 employees, gave them all a Christmas bonus and kept paying their health insurance and weekly salaries until the Mill was rebuilt. His employees wept with unbelief. Corporate and capitalist America was stunned by such "insanity," and named him "CEO of the Year." The Law of the Spirit in Feuerstein, alive and well, needs no other laws, for it compels him to do all that a human being is called to do (and even more) in order to be a human being.

I never feel comfortable citing heavyweights like Mother Theresa or like this CEO of the Year. It gives the impression that what you are talking about happens once or twice in a lifetime. Which is to say, it doesn’t have much to do with the ordinary daily lives of most of us. And that is not true. The Law of the Spirit in Mother Theresa, alive ands well, is found in all those mothers (and fathers) who, like Mother Mary, gaze "with love beyond all telling" upon the infants they have brought forth. That Law within them, alive and well, needs no other laws, for there are no other laws that could possibly compel them to do more than they are already prepared to do for the flesh of their flesh.

The dirtied slate

In the beginning, the Law of our creation (to be the human being we were created to be) is written on a tabula rasa – a clean slate,. But soon culture dirties the clean slate and starts blotting out the capital L Law.

The culture of violence dirties up the clean slate. The chief product of the entertainment industry is often nothing more than purely gratuitous violence. Our couch-potato kids, watching TV and playing their Intendo games for hours upon hours, are light years away from the old “pacifist question” that we Christians used to agonize over: Is violence ever lawful, even that which is directed against violence? For some violence is not only lawful, sometimes it is “absolutely” necessary to solve a problem, like getting even with a teacher who has just expelled you from school for throwing water balloons all over the place.(By the way, Barry Grunow, the teacher who got one good solid shot in the face for his “outrageous” discipline was characterized by someone at the school as “a person who was everything a teacher should be, and everything a human being should be.” For others violence is not only lawful, it is also fun! It is, in fact, their entertainment! How in the world can the Law of our creation (to be the human beings we were created to be) be written on such a slate as that?

The culture of virtual reality(to use the jargon of the day) which has us staring into computer monitors for hours upon hours instead of staring into human faces; the e-mail culture which eliminates for us the bother of human contact; the communication culture (or rather the “in-communication” culture) which has us talking not to real live human beings but to electronic gadgets that offer us menus that we can’t eat -- these all dirty the clean slate for us. How in the world can the Law of our creation (to be the human beings we were created to be) be written on such a slate as that? To be a human being you need other human beings.

The culture of selfishness also dirties the clean slate. When we give our kids things and more things because we feel guilty for not having time to give them ourselves, or when our kids have only been receiving and taking in their lives, and have never been givin, because we have not challenged them to give, then we are raising a selfish generation that can say only, “Me me me!” How in the world can the Law of our creation (to be human the human beings we were created to be) be written on such a slate as that? How in the world can the Law of Love which says, “you, you, you” be written on a slate that has “Me, me, me” written all over it?

After so much, so little!

When the one capital L Law of our creation (to be the human being we were created to be) is not alive and well but is, in fact, broken down and needs fixing, then the 613 small l laws (with their threats of penalties and punishments) have to kick in and take over in the mean-time Then we need a law to outlaw bringing weapons to school for shooting up a class-room And we another law to outlaw garbaging up the neighborhood. And we need another law to outlaw graffiting the walls. And another law to outlaw hate crimes and race crimes. And we need another law to outlaw child abuse and elderly abuse. And we need another law to outlaw cruelty to animals. And we need another law to outlaw defacing our Mother Earth. And we need another law to outlaw shattering the night silence with our boom-boxes blasting away two in the morning. And we need another law to outlaw drive-by shootings. And after all that outlawing, still so many outlaws!

After so many laws, still so little humanity! After so many laws, nothing much more than this: people forced to act as though they were human but still not really human at all; people forced to act as though they were not monsters, but monster they still are. For given the right moment, when the law or the laws are not looking, they will unleash upon us their sub-humanity or their inhumanity, which the good old "arm of the law" (or rather “laws”) was never able to reach in the first place.

The cultural crisis

We have a cultural crisis on our hands. The Law of our creation (to be the human being we were created to be) , is broken down; it’s not working; it’s out of order; it needs fixing. We are raising a generation of offspring who are not rising up to the Law of their creation. That means a generation that is non-human or sub-human or even inhuman. Can we be saying that we are raising a generation of monsters!? That sounds terribly strong. But I’ll tell you a well-known secret: this is what many are saying in private and frank conversations.

Time magazine labeled the two perpetrators of the worst school massacre in American history “The Monsters Next Door. “ Do not forget for one moment that these two kids didn’t bear Afro-American or Latino names, but lily white suburban names like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The really disturbing thing about the beheading of the black man in Jasper, Texas, as skin heads dragged him behind their truck; the really disturbing thing about the murder of Mat Shepherd, the gay student from Wyoming State University, whom skin heads beat to a pulp, then tied to a fence like a scarecrow out in the country somewhere, leaving him to die bathed in his tears and blood; the really disturbing thing about all the school massacres, especially the one at Columbine High with its two monsters bearing lily white suburban names is this: we are no longer talking about those people over there in the inner cities of New York or Chicago or Houston. We are now talking about ourselves!

Conclusion

(Over and over again)

As Moses was law-giver for the people of Israel, so Jesus is our Law-giver. But he bears in his arms only one tablet, and upon it is inscribed only one Law. Not 613 laws. Not even two laws: one great law for loving God and another great law for loving neighbor. Just one great law, for he nailed the two great laws together and out of the two of them he made one: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with whole heart and soul and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Then Christ gave us the same command that Moses gave the people: “Take these words and tie them to your wrists and your foreheads, and nail them to your doorposts and your gates, and tell them over and over again to your children” (Dt 6:4-9). Yes, indeed, in our present cultural crisis, let us take our 613 plus laws and melt them down into two. And then let us nail the two together into one great Law, and let us tell that one great Law to our children over and over again.