When I was directing the drop in center for homeless people in Palo Alto, one day one of our regulars, a panhandler who suffered from alcoholism, excitedly reported to me an incident that had happened the day before. A man in a suit came up to him on the street and gave him a $20 bill and said, "Go buy a good bottle of wine!" Which is exactly what the panhandler did.
The guy in the suit was practicing the next step beyond the Golden Rule. He was practicing the Diamond Rule: do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
It sounds good and right to do to others as you want them to do to you. But what you want isn’t necessarily what others want. Very often at our drop in center for the homeless, the staff and volunteers wanted different things than a lot of the homeless folks wanted. So they would offer things to our homeless folks, assuming that the homeless folks wanted what they wanted. And often that did not work at all.
In turn, if certain of our homeless folks gave us what they wished we would give to them, we would have received baggies full of contraband every day!
So the Diamond Rule has its pitfalls, too. Sounds really good to serve others the way they want to be served – that can be a lot better than self-centeredly assuming that they like to be served just the way I like to be served. However there are times when the way somebody wants you to do unto them is really and truly not good for them nor for you. Like giving a bottle of wine - good or bad wine - to an alcoholic. At the homeless drop in center, we couldn’t be handing out cocaine and heroin just because that is what some folks desired more than anything else.
So maybe the Golden Rule and the Diamond Rule should be renamed—the Golden Hint and the Diamond Hint. When trying to decide how to treat someone, it’s a good hint to ask, how would I like to be treated in this situation? But we can’t stop there. We get more hints by asking: how does this person want to be treated that might be different than how I’d like to be treated? And is it really appropriate for me, and for them, for me to treat them that way?
Much as we have in common, much as we share across all ages and cultures, we humans have our profound differences, and to love each other requires of us a profound curiosity about those differences. The Golden Hint and the Diamond Hint get us started asking questions, exploring what it means to love and serve a particular person – but we can’t stop there. Love requires an emptying of assumptions, a willingness to ask yet more and more questions.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard meditated on this principle of loving your neighbor as yourself. He came up with this brain-teasing version of it: “You shall love yourself as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.” That is, you can’t love your neighbor without loving yourself. But the self you love when you love yourself needs to be the self that loves your neighbor. And that self is one that is constantly emptying itself of assumptions and judgments and opinions about others, so that it can be filled with love for neighbors.
In the letter to the Philippians, St. Paul offered a deep mystical interpretation of the life of Jesus. He said that Jesus didn’t count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but that Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a human servant. He didn’t assume he had all the answers about what everybody needed from him. His inner divinity wasn’t something he could hold onto.
I love the quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh: “People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.” You know, a lot of people talk about Jesus as if he was something you could give, too. They talk about Jesus as if they could get their arms around him and assume they know exactly who he is and what he wants. They talk about Jesus as if he was something they could hand out to people who they thought needed salvation, as if Jesus was something that a person could receive like an armful of flowers, neatly trimmed and wrapped in a bow. Meanwhile, St. Paul tells us that Jesus had emptied himself. It’s the spiritual practice of emptying one’s self of egotism and selfishness and reactivity so that there will be room for God to take up residence within us. A God we can’t grasp. Any more than we can grasp each other.
And that is the great pitfall into which I drop, over and over again, in my stumbling efforts to love. I keep thinking I can grasp my wife. Yes, I can hold her hand, yes, I can get my arms around her. But until I am empty of my assumptions about her, empty of my judgments and opinions about her, I am a long way from really loving her. I like this quote from Stewart Emery: “Most people who say they have a commitment ... have an attachment.” And I like that Henry Miller line: “Looking back, I realize my loves were, in actuality, obsessions.” Until I let go of my obsession for and about my wife, let go of grasping for her, let go of my attachment to her, until I am empty, I cannot really act on my commitment to love my wife.
And we are hungry for this kind of love. The love that is emptied of ego, emptied of presumptuousness, emptied of the assumption that the other person is not an other – but is the same as you. Yes, we have a lot in common -- most of us hunger for this kind of love that can be given only by someone who has emptied him or herself. But other people are others! So basic, but we forget it all too often. This otherness is something to celebrate! ...and always to take into account.
I find myself jumping to conclusions, finishing other people’s sentences in conversations, not taking the time to let what they say and do sink into me – because I’m so full of myself that there’s not enough room for them inside of me. I can’t pay attention unless I’m empty enough to have room within me to receive what I see, hear, and begin to understand about others. Jesus kept asking his disciples and followers: “Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18) Jesus wanted his followers to pay attention. Not just to him, but to pay deep and close attention to the world around them, to the glory of creation, to pay attention to the people that they could heal and help, to the needs of their society, to really listen to the wisdom of children and women who were supposed only to be seen and not heard, to pay attention to the stories and struggles of people who were considered unclean and unacceptable. For this he emptied himself, over and over, so he could love with a clean and clear heart. For this, we are challenged to let ourselves be emptied, so that we can satisfy our common yearning for love.