Sabbath Devotional :: Infinite Loop of Agape

infinite loop of agape - Mormon Women for Ethical Government

“An infinite loop (sometimes called an endless loop) is a piece of coding that lacks a functional exit so that it repeats indefinitely.”

I have a faint recollection of the concept of an infinite loop from an undergraduate computer coding class I took over 20 years ago. When a young man in my ward used the phrase in a gospel context during his missionary farewell recently, I felt a jolt of recognition as it related to some of my personal spiritual experiences over the past few years. It was a way to describe a state of being that I felt gloriously “stuck” in. It began with love, then became marked by hate, before being transformed into a new kind of love.

I have consistently found it relatively effortless to love people. It certainly helps that I have lived a life mostly filled with people who made themselves easy to love — one that has not been distinguished by significant trauma at the hands of others. While certainly acquainted with suffering, I don’t know what it feels like to experience meaningful pain at the hands of another person.

Because of that, the charge to “love my enemy” has been a bit theoretical. That changed in the past few years when I was able to concretely identify an enemy for the first time in my life. In this case, it was those who cause suffering to people I love. This enemy consisted of racists and bigots and, more specifically, those who spread fear, hate, and lies about refugees and immigrants.

I found a significant anger and resentment burning in my soul toward my newly identified enemies. I felt justified in those feelings and fed them with a sense of personal righteousness for standing up for those who were being hurt by hateful words and policies. After a period of time, I realized I was both miserable and generally unhelpful to those I was theoretically “defending.” It took a great deal of time and brain space to try to justify my feelings, and it was, ironically, getting in the way of my ability to minister to those in need.

As I studied and prayed for a long time, asking for the blazing hostility to fade away, I discovered I could not just stamp out the resentment. I had to take it a step further and somehow turn it into goodwill. In other words, I found my answer in the principle of loving my (long elusive) enemy. It turns out you can have the space in your heart to both love the persecuted and the persecutor. When you figure out how to love the ones who are the hardest for you to love, you find that the growth in your heart gives you more room to advocate for and love the ones who are easy to love too. Love is not a scarce resource to be guarded and hidden. Rather, it expands to fill the space you allow for it and then it carves new pathways in your soul beyond that allotted area.

In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a profound sermon about loving your enemies in Dexter, Alabama. He spoke about the word “agape,” which comes from the Greek language and is used in the New Testament. “Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.

“. . . You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, ‘Love your enemy.’ This is the way to do it. When the opportunity presents itself when you can defeat your enemy, you must not do it.”

As I actively sought to create a practice of loving my enemy, I began to feel the “understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill” Dr. King describes. But there were additional and exquisite byproducts: personal revelation and increased spiritual capacity. This is best illustrated by my experience attending the temple, a place I struggled with for almost two decades. In the past few years, it has become an absolute delight to be anticipated and treasured. Many factors played into that, but the biggest one was a shift in the way I approached my temple attendance.

For years, I had entered the temple with a list of personal burdens I wished to have lifted. I certainly received some answers to prayers and had several sacred experiences, but more often than not I left with a migraine and did not necessarily crave the opportunity to go back.

Inspired by the exercise of loving my enemies, I began a regular practice of taking other people’s suffering to the temple. I started carrying in my heart the names and circumstances of the people I loved (especially my newly identified enemies) and spent time there praying for them. The outcome was astonishing — an outpouring of inspiration and compassion in my heart and some unexpected blessings connected to long-entrenched personal challenges. I don’t think it is a coincidence that when I turned outside myself in this way, I tapped into a source of greater spiritual power that allowed me to at long last resolve some pressing and particular trials.

This discovery kicked off a period of intense personal growth. What began as unproductive resentment and anger was transformed into an expanded heart and increased personal revelation. I entered with bitterness and exited into what I wish to be an “infinite loop” of “agape” and inspiration.

In contrast to the flawed coding that lacks a functional exit so therefore repeats without purpose, this is the sort of infinite loop I wish to be “stuck” in, along with those I love. Going round and round, we find that love multiplies on itself in astonishing fashion. And the true nature of this “agape” begins to be revealed to us.

We move away from viewing love through the lens of scarcity and instead see it through the lens of abundant and infinite divinity. We share it freely and it grows. We share it freely and we grow. Do not exit the loop. Repeat indefinitely.