In one of those serendipitous occurences, I've started reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde at the same time as preparing sermons using Stephen Verney's The Dance of Love (click here for sermon). There have been several overlaps and parallels that I have noticed as a result.
I wrote that "If we don’t give love away to others then we become a blockage in the constant exchange of love of which we are a part and this prevents us from receiving love at the same time that love ceases to be shared with others through us." Hyde suggests "we think of the gift as a constantly flowing river" and allow ourselves "to become a channel for its current." When we try to "dam the river", "thinking what counts is ownership and size," "one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate or it will fill the person up until he bursts."
One of the forms of gift exchange with which Hyde's book is concerned is reciprocal giving:
"The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points. This is why ... most of the stories of gift exchange have a minimum of three people ... so long as the gift passes out of sight it cannot be manipulated by one man or one pair of gift partners. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith ... The gift can circulate at every level of the ego. In the ego-of-one we speal of self-gratification, and whether it's forced or chosen, a virtue or a vice, the mark of self-gratification is its isolation. Reciprocal giving, the ego-of-two, is a little more social. We think mostly of lovers. Each of these circles is exhilarating as it expands, and the little gifts that pass between lovers touch us because each is stepping into a larger circuit. But again, if the exchange goes on and on to the exclusion of others, it soon goes stale."
This, it seems to me, has clear parallels with the image I used of the interaction between the male and female partners in a ballroom dance which equates to Hyde's talk of lovers; George Bernard Shaw apparently said of ballroom dancing that it is "the vertical expression of a horizontal intent." Yet the exchanges possible between two people, whether dance partners or lovers, are linear. For exchange to become circular, moving beyond the control of the personal ego, a minimum of three people are required; which is where in my sermon we move to discussion of the eternal exchange found within the Trinity. Three persons are the minimum requirement for a group gift exchange and donation as an act of social faith.
In another sermon on gift (click here) I quoted David Runcorn as saying that “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” To be God-like, he writes, “is not to be grasping” and so “Jesus pours himself out ‘precisely because’ he is God from God.” The Biblical word for this is kenosis, the self-emptying of God. But Runcorn goes on to point out that this self-emptying or kenosis characterises every member of the Trinity and argues that Jesus’ incarnation “offers us a mysterious and astonishing vision”:
“the Holy Trinity as a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped. They live and know each other in the simple ecstasy of giving.”
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U2 - One.
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