Walking In Love: Why and How?

Second Edition

Why and How?

SUZANNE MILLER

Walking In Love : Why and How?

Copyright © 2023 by Suzanne Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

All New Testament scriptural quotations in this book are direct translations by the author from the Greek of the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Societies (NA/UBS) text - The Greek New Testament, 4th Revised Edition - published by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft (German Bible Society). The single quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures (Deuteronomy 5) is taken from the New International Version of the Bible (NIB).

ISBN

978-1-959365-65-5 (Paperback)

978-1-959365-66-2 (eBook)

978-1-959365-64-8 (Hardcover)

This book is dedicated to the Most Reverend Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church. It was his leadership and preaching on the redemptive power of love as he picked up the torch lit by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that, by the grace of God, motivated me to write this book.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Which Path?

Cultural Contamination

Kenosis—What Is It and Why Is It Important to Us?

The Benefits of the Walk

Walking in Love: The Process

The Primacy of Love in Human Life

Choosing Life over Death

Summary

Epilogue

About The Author

Introduction

LIVING LIFE MORE FULLY

This book addresses a goal of living life more fully in a changing world. It presents a process for accomplishing this goal that is both backward-looking (to benefit from past wisdom) and forward-looking (to address the problems of a changing world and changing circumstances). I call this process walking in love.

Although this book is about shared humanity, it also aligns with often-neglected teachings of Jesus that pertain to achieving the goal noted above. This is no accident. I’m a lifelong Christian, so I tend to tell the story in that context. People with a different set of life experiences may tell the story a bit differently. No problem! I consider it all to be the same story told from many different points of view.

Why is this important now? I assert it is because our spiritual practices can become rigid and dogmatic and thus inadequate and unsuitable for a changing world.

What are some examples of these world changes? Birth control for those who have access to it, the explosion of the human population because of better health and improved food production, changes in our global climate, and the increase in malevolent power of individuals when you pair modern technologies for communications, weapons, and control of people with traditional fanaticism and egotism, to name a few.

Two thousand years ago or so, the world was also changing rapidly. Jesus led a spiritual revolution that broke free of old, dogmatic ideas and gave people a spirituality that was adaptable. It took the best of the old and grew it to handle the new. In this way, it actually fulfills the previous traditions.

Everything I write focuses on some aspect of human design as revealed in our common experience. I start by focusing on human inadequacy and the anxiety it provokes in us.

Spiritual people, people of faith, tend to be people of good intention. Even so, good intention only takes us so far. This is because we humans are limited in our capabilities. Those capabilities are not equal to the task of carrying out our good intentions. To be more precise, sometimes (most times?) we are not strong enough, or wise enough or caring enough.

Quite often, when those moments occur and our actions are insufficient because of our human limitations, the result is disaster— bad consequences for others. Sometimes those others are people we care very deeply about and for whom we want only the best.

This has always been a human problem, but a rapidly changing world just makes things worse.

We feel guilty and often look to shift the blame for the bad results to others.

In most cases, the other is God, even though we may pretend otherwise. We are angry at God for making us the imperfect creatures that we are. God has given us guidance in the form of religious teachings on how to speak and act to avoid contributing to those disasters, but our humanity limits us in putting that guidance into effect. The anger focuses on a critical question: Why create us as flawed creatures and tell us how to live, knowing that we are not capable of carrying out that guidance?

One way of handling this difficulty is to ignore it, to ignore our limitations. This is the way of the demagogue, the tyrant, the dictator, whose appeal to the community is Give me the power and I’ll fix things.

Silly person! You can’t fix anything; you only make matters worse by dragging the rest of us down to failure and suffering with you after we give you the power and you misuse it in the service of your own ego! We buy into the fantasy