Recently, I read Falling to Heaven by James L. Farrell. I've previously read Farrell's The Peacegiver and The Holy Secret. I'm always impressed by his insights into the gospel. Most of what he writes is so common sense and it's all scripturally based, but some of the insights still take me by surprise.
In the introduction (or is it the first chapter?) of Falling to Heaven, Farrell makes a point that has fundamentally changed the way I think about charity. He shares an experience about sitting in a sacrament meeting talk one day where the speaker was emphasizing the importance of loving ourselves. He asked himself where in the scriptures we are encouraged to love ourselves. He also spent a lot of time post-hearing-this-talk looking for references in the scriptures to Christ's self-love.
He couldn't find any.
The only scripture he found that could be read as referring to self-love was the oft-repeated commandment to love others as we love ourselves (the implication being that we must love ourselves if we're going to love others). Farrell suggests that Christ wasn't at all concerned with loving himself, but only with loving His Father and with loving us. When the scriptures talk about loving others as we love ourselves, it's referring to the fact that we must see others' pain as our own and celebrate others' accomplishments as our own--not that we need to focus on self-love. In other words, we need to seek to be so unified with the people around us--have our hearts knit together so closely with theirs--that there isn't a difference between what happens to them and what happens to us. This is what God's love for us is about: He fully experiences our pain as His own pain. His sense of self is broad enough to include all others--it looks outward, not inward.
Now, being the rhetoric nerd that I am, this concept immediately brought to mind Kenneth Burke's concept of identification. Burke writes that identification is about seeing what is alike between yourself and another person or an entire group of people. There is one major obstacle to identification, however, according to Burke: “[A]lthough I as a person may sympathetically identify myself with other people’s pleasures and pains, in my nature as a sheer body the pleasures of my food and the pains of my toothache are experienced by me alone” ("The Rhetorical Situation," Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues, 265-66). Because we inhabit separate bodies, we can't fully identify with one another. This is one of challenges of living in mortality in a physical body.
But the miracle of the Atonement is that one separate, individual body (the body of Christ) was able to fully inhabit and experience the separate, individual pains of billions of people. Christ bridged the gap of the inability of one body to connect with another body. He is one with the Father and Holy Ghost, and He can be one with us, as he prayed for in his intercessory prayer, if we will follow His example and receive His love.
How do we receive? I think we have to be willing to love as He did. We have to live the two great commandments. We have to lose ourselves in loving and serving God and others in order to find ourselves. This is why Moroni writes so urgently that we need to pray with all energy of heart for the love of Christ. Charity helps us to find better versions of ourselves. In loving others and following Christ, we become the children of Christ--part of his family. We take upon ourselves His identity--quite literally: we take upon ourselves His name--and in so doing we become one with Him and the Father. It's this perfect and complete connection with God and those around us that constitutes true charity. It's also what I believe heaven will be all about.
