Between us
And through us offers love unqualified and free. Can it be true love, then—or is it a compro- mised love—when some threat drives us to do the right or some payoff persuades us? A good- ness given for a goodness gotten is a business deal. No blame in that. No love either.
At the end of our least DESIGNPICS
Of urinals and the least of these
T
here’s a cigarette butt in the urinal. Saddest, soppingest, yel- lowest, shreddingest castaway I ever hope to see again. But sadder than that cigarette is the poor soul forced to scoop it out again. I know that poor soul. I call her by name. She has children and tired feet and bills and a blessed capacity for friendship. And she is: the night-clerk here at this family owned gas station who is my friend.
But saddest of all, I think, is the impoverished soul who was first to act, flicking his unflushable butt under showers of urine, zipping
Wangerin, an author of many novels and books of essays, is an ELCA pastor and senior research pro- fessor at Valparaiso [Ind.] University (walterwangerinjr. org). His “Between us” column appears quarterly in The Lutheran.
act, and ever affected by that act (why, the whole world is shaped by such acts), stands another human being. Always. And
that human was made in the image of God.
••••• By Walter Wangerin Jr.
up and walking away. The man is benighted. He cannot see—or doesn’t care to see—that at the end of even his slightest act there always stands another person, one whom he shall have scorned or might have loved by his habitual behavior.
I wonder whether this flicker of cigarettes can claim truly to love oth- ers. Surely he doesn’t love my friend. He befouled her fingers and some piece of her dignity. He didn’t have to know her to know that she existed, nor to know that he made her exis- tence a greater drudgery. This may be the acid test of a
genuine love: how do we love the ones we may never meet, those who can neither punish nor reward the deeds we choose to do? True love arises, ironically, from the selves that we are not. Something from a noth- ing. True love loves the Lover first and then allows the true Lover to fill our empty selves with his Something. Divine Love arises and acts in us.
30 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
So then: how do we love God? Answer that by asking: how do we love our neighbor? And answer that by asking: with what love do we perform the minikin acts that reach through the mists to the minikin, invisible people? Jesus is the Doer and the Done-to, the Lover and the beloved, the one who sends and the one who receives; for it is with these that Christ identifies the least of his sisters and his brothers. When I lean on a car horn, I may destroy my neighbor’s peace for the rest of the day. But she is made in the image of God. When I neglect to signal a left- hand turn, I neglect the driver behind me, who might have gone forward in the right lane had he known of my intention. But cars back up behind him now, and all must wait for the oncoming traffic to pass: me; the drivers who have lost the green light when I make my turn; and God as well. Christian, Christian, did you think that God rides in your car only? O man, when you dare to call your wife “the little woman” or when you declare that “behind every great man
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