Picture this:
It’s Saturday. You spent the morning writing another triumphant essay and doing a great shoulders and legs work out. Then you watch the last one and a half episodes of a series you’ve really enjoyed and are even calling “art”. You have one giant beer (nut brown ale) with a few nuts and head out to take in a salsa class, dropping your laundry on the way; after salsa you go shopping at the co-op, where you buy a lot delicious organic produce, some nuts and seeds, a Swiss cheese made in Switzerland with raw milk, and a few other essentials.

You are walking to the train and feeling sore. Your legs are sore and your shoulders are too, and so is upper back, and you’ve got a bookbag and two giant canvas bags — all laden down with groceries.

You see them, a man a woman and a child, standing in front of a bank. It’s night time on a Saturday, so the bank is of course closed. They have a sign. A sign on cardboard. You look away. You guess it says that they are from Ecuador and need help. Lately that’s what you’ve been seeing around Brooklyn: Young families with signs saying they are from Ecuador and they are stranded and they need help. You look away because it is embarrassing to walk past them with all these expensive groceries on your shoulders.

The essay that you’d worked on all morning and that you thought was good, but that you’d been tweaking a little in your mind as you made your way to and from your salsa lesson, made good use of Jesus’s most important commandment. And so, as you look away you can’t help but note that this is not what the Good Samaritan would do. It just isn’t. It isn’t at all the radical selfless love that Jesus preached.

When Jesus was asked what the most important commandment was, he didn’t go for any part of the Ten Commandments or other clear cut rules. He gave a mystical formulation: Love God with everything you are and love yourself and everyone else equally. That’s not a rule, or a rule of thumb, it is a poetic pointing-towards a way of being that is deeper and wider than human feelings, ideas, and words.

But when asked to clarify a point — who exactly counts as my neighbor? — Jesus gave a very concrete, real-life example and a very clear, albeit impossible to fulfill, command.

Maybe sometimes a person can stop what they are doing and fully attend to someone in need, but you can’t walk anywhere in Brooklyn very long without seeing people with signs, people asking for help who look like they could use a lot of help. You could give them a dollar or a few dollars. You could look away to save yourself the embarrassment of walking past them with lots of groceries that you bought specifically to satisfy your own habits, notions, and schedules. You could stop and talk to them and hear their story — your Spanish is pretty good. What would Jesus actually do? He didn’t stop and help everybody all the time. And sometimes he only seemed to give out miracles begrudgingly. And anyway it’s a big and pretty unfair advantage to be able to do miracles — although now that I think about it, he never magically wished away anyone’s poverty.

Strictly speaking, the commandment is to have 100% love for God shining through everything, including your conscious moment and the conscious moments of everyone else, and to love yourself and everyone else with that God-directed and God-grounded loving. So the commandment is mostly and inward one. So, strictly speaking, you can tell yourself you’re following the commandment pretty well even if you aren’t. But the story of the Good Samaritan is harder to fudge. And we’re tested every day over and over and we come up wanting. We even sometimes explain to ourselves that the most important commandment has value as a poem and a type of koan and a meditation and an important point, but of course you can’t really do it because there’s things you have to do and if you open up your heart to everyone all the time in this busy world: why, you’ll just get sucked into everybody else’s problems all the time, and never get anything done! Right? The experiment seems too dangerous to take. And, anyway, it’s clearly impossible; so pretending you can do it is just a lie you tell yourself.

This is a problem for the mystically-minded seeker who finds Jesus’s formulation of the path convincing. It is a problem, also, for the practical-minded Christian who has decided to make following Jesus Christ a fundamental part of their own life. What do we do? We agree here, but our agreement is about the necessity of adopting a path that neither of us quite understands and that seems to conflict with both our needs to take care of ourselves, our loved ones, do our tasks, live in the world.

I think it is worth pointing out that our agreement here is part of the general agreement of humanity to be first and foremost mystical believers in Love, and to also not let any dogmas keep us from abiding by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing). For we all know that either Love is True or we have no path towards being meaningful to ourselves. And we all know that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we think/feel aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind and joyfully-sharing. But we all also know that our ideas about spiritual Love are not the same as spiritual Love, and that confusing one’s ideas and feelings about the True Good with the True Good account for a good part of human evil. Hence we all know — at some level — that we can only be meaningful to ourselves by centering our feeling/thinking/acting around spiritual Love and attempting to interpret that Love in our feeling/thinking/acting, but always remembering that that Love is wider and deeper than our feeling/thinking/acting, so we cannot pretend any of our ideas or feelings are the Truth, but must always keep working to better follow Pure Love — always self-critiquing -analyzing, and -adjusting, always starting over again, always pushing out from within and praying again for the wisdom to be gentle with ourselves and others.

It is for this reason that I argue that a liberal democratic republican form of government is a spiritual good: It allows us to keep our government from corruption and from committing crimes against us and others, and in this way we together safeguard those universal values without which none of our worldviews are meaningful to any of us; and we also keep the world safe for spiritual Love: after all, the great evil of tyrannical governments is that they require people to choose between (A) accepting, being complicit in, pretending not to see, and to some degree participating in large-scale evil, or (B) telling the truth, doing the right thing, sticking up for your neighbor, saying No to dishonesty, unfairness, corruption, and cruelty. It’s not that you cannot follow a holy path in a tyranny, but forcing those kinds of hopeless my-family-versus-your-family choices onto people does everyone a great disservice. In a healthy democracy, the aims of the government line up well with the universal values: Tell the truth, be accurate and competent, govern well, seek win-wins for the good of all, and then, when you are up for reelection, with a pure heart, make your case to the people and let them decide how well you did. And if you lose: Okay, because it is better to lose power in a liberal democratic republic than it is to have to spend your life desperately handing onto power in a tyranny, when to stay in charge you’ve committed crimes against your own citizens, and so if you ever lose power: uh oh!, so that’s not an option.

Donald Trump wants to be dictator. And that means he wants to imprison himself in a life of crimes committed against this nation. For everyone’s sake — including his — we must together tell him and his would-be lackeys: NO.

But I digress.

The point is, Jesus is much more radical than any of his followers. If regular people get as radical as him, they end up becoming evil. Because they don’t have the fingers for it; they can get his zeal, but they can’t get the compassion that makes that zeal a spiritual good. Well, that’s not entirely true: There are saints, there are holy people, there are people who put Love first. But they are not most people, and they are not the person we imagined you to be today as you walked past the family on the street with the cardboard sign that you didn’t even read. So what right do you have to essays that invoke the most important commandment? And yet, what right do preachers have to preach the Gospel when most preachers are also not getting very close to the spiritual Love that Jesus said was the whole point of the religious life?

Where does that leave us? One hypocrite scolding another?