Sociopathic Love

I love the Showtime series "Dexter". It's about a serial killer who works in the Miami police department doing crime analysis, specifically blood spatter (appropriately). As the result of a horrific event in his childhood Dexter is a classic sociopath. He doesn't feel emotions like the rest of us do. He doesn't really understand them. He doesn't have a "conscience" in the classic sense because "wrong" and "right" have no meaning. Dexter's adoptive father (who was also a Miami police officer) realized this early in Dexter's life and did everything he could to teach him how people work, how emotions play out and how to fake them convincingly to get along. He also taught him a series of "rules" so that he could indulge his murderous urges without causing much harm or getting caught. Now Dexter only kills other killers.

It's fascinating to watch Dexter walk out relationships. He doesn't understand what motivates people, but he is an expert observer of human behavior. He is a top-notch actor. He does and says all the right things at the right times, but Dexter is always sizing everyone up as a potential informant or a potential target. He's the perfect boyfriend, employee and brother, but something is not quite right. People walk away from even casual encounters with Dexter knowing that something doesn't add up.

We Christians are experts at faking relationships. We're well-trained in the fine art of smiling at people who disgust us. We're taught the Golden Rule early and often, and led to understand that this is the essence of Christian love. We are sternly instructed to live in sociopathic love, whereby we love everyone like Jesus did, even the people we hate. You don't need to "love" anyone so long as you act like you do. That's the important part. So put a smile on your face and get it done like Jesus would have.

It all starts with our perception of God and the way he loves us. This is the reason it's so important to understand the way he loves us: we will walk that understanding out with other people. If we perceive our relationship with him practically as an impossible attempt to live up to a set of arbitrary standards, then that will set the agenda in terms of our expectations of other people. If we view Christianity as a rigid set of rules or an inflexible moral code, then that's what we'll expect of other people. This is the meaning behind "forgive us our debts as we forgive those who owe us a debt". It's not "forgive or God won't forgive you", as though God's mercy is somehow dependent on our behavior. It means that the extent to which we understand grace will set the tone for every encounter we have from that point on. God's love will either be detrimental or transformational depending on our starting point.

If we live by rules and not by love then we are Christian sociopaths. We're Dexter, only the carnage is emotional and not physical. People will find us out, probably pretty quickly. People aren't as gullible as we think they are. They know when we're being nice because we have to or because we have an ulterior motive (to get them "saved", for example). The problem is not only that this behavior is ineffective. The bigger problem is that it's counterproductive. It actually pushes people further away from God than they were before.

In his book "A River Runs Through It", Norman Mailer writes that "we can love completely without complete understanding." I have yet to encounter a more biblical understanding of practical, realistic love than that. Love completely and don't worry about complete understanding.