Yesterday’s post on Gen Y‘s default transactional view of relationships drew comment from Ys who inadvertently proved what they sought to refute. It’s understandable. As most commenters noted, Gen Y’s upbringing by Boomer parents who tried to buy their affection instilled them from the start with a quid pro quo view of relationships. The mere concept of love with no strings attached besets them with deep-seated guilt arising from despair.
That kind of conditioning is fiendishly hard to break. Some respondents struggled to conceive of any relationship not based on some form of exchange. These poor souls were robbed of charity in the cradle. Living in a world without love, enlightened self-interest is the best they can hope for.
The point of this post isn’t to rub Ys’ noses in the mess of their spiritual lives. It’s to give them hope that yes, unconditional love is available to them. And to give fraternal warning that not availing themselves of that hope could well have eternal repercussions.
When asked for an example of a non-transactional relationship, it’s best to go straight to the source and invoke unconditional love par excellence–God’s relationship to Man.
As explained previously, God is perfect. That simple statement has a whole host of implications. For our purposes here, it means God is completely self-necessary. He lacks nothing. Not only does that mean imperfect beings like us have nothing at all to offer Him, it dictates that if we could engage in a substantive mutual exchange with God, His participation would be contingent on ours, and therefore conditioned by a necessity outside Himself, and therefore He would not be absolutely self-necessary, and therefore not perfect, and therefore not God.
But as the Law of Identity states, God is God. So no transactional relationship with Him is possible.
In response to this example, the objection of God’s covenant-making with mankind was raised. God has indeed made multiple covenants with men, and those covenants have terms. Don’t they give the lie to claims that Man’s relationship to God isn’t transactional?
To answer that objection, let’s consider Genesis 15: 9-21, God’s covenant with Abraham.
So the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”
Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates—the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”
By way of explanation, the Biblical text portrays a pretty common covenant-making ceremony from the ancient Near East. The idea was, you’d sacrifice the prescribed animals and split their carcasses in two. Then both parties would walk between the halved sacrifices as a way of saying, “May I end up like these animals if I break this covenant.”
But the Genesis account contains a crucial departure from the norm. Abram does not walk between the split sacrifices. Only God does. That’s a sign none of Genesis’ original audience would miss, saying that God alone took all of the covenant penalties upon Himself for both parties. Abram gets all the benefits. God foots the entire bill.
And because God is perfect, He is perfectly faithful. We broke the covenant. He paid the penalty, just as He promised Abraham.
It’s important to note that a covenant is not a contract that memorializes a transaction. It’s a solemn vow that establishes kinship. In the case of God’s covenant, the form of kinship is adoption. Christians are sons and daughters of God by virtue of His covenant promises. That’s how we know the parent-child relationship is not to be transactional, and that is how Boomers failed Gen Y.
But Gen Y isn’t off the hook–nor is anyone else. Because in John 13:34, Jesus exercises His divine authority to lay down the law.
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
Cult of Nice Christians gloss over this verse as a feel-good “Wuv is swell!” greeting card platitude. It’s nothing of the sort. Here, Christ invokes the same authority God used to give Moses the Ten Commandments. He thereby issues a solemn, binding command that Christians not only love one another, but that we love each other as I have loved you.
How does Christ love us? Selflessly, unconditionally, unreservedly. He does not reduce love to a transaction. Instead he makes a gift of His whole Self.
That is how all Christians are to love–as an act of self-emptying untainted by self-interest.
Some replies defined love as seeking the good of another. That’s only the beginning–philos, or brotherly love. Christians are commanded to exercise caritas–seeking the good of another out of love for God.
This is the charity that is called the greatest virtue, because in it all other virtues find their true end.
If we love anything or anyone, it should only be to the extent we love God, and it should be purified of any and all self-interest.
“But wait,” you say, “that’s impossible!”
But Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible.”
A bit off topic, apologies, but I do wonder if the children of the Boomers react so differently towards each other because of these vastly different views of what love actually is.
Gen X saw the love of their parents as false and rejected it wholesale, pledging to devote their existence to always Do The Opposite of them and be left alone. Gen Y saw the love of their parents as transactional and when, inexplicably, the transaction stopped they fell into despair and a tailspin into materialism–the only place where transactions work as intended. It helps explain why libertarianism is only popular with these two generations and is a complete non-starter with anyone else.
Meanwhile, Millennials were molded to just be Boomers, complete with nonsensical emotionalism, a hate for everything that came before, and a promise of Paradise once the obstacles are ground into dust. These are the children they always wanted to begin with, which is why they appreciate and support them the most, though it is a narcissistic affection that is expended whenever the Millennial needs aid dealing with reality (student debt) or questioning the programming even slightly.
Why don’t Gen Ys like being grouped in Millennials? Because they are part of two different worlds. You might as well question why they aren’t grouped with Gen X. They have just many differences with them.
Keep in mind, these are all children of the same generation, and yet they are all so vastly different. If you need any proof that Boomers were the most psyop’d group to ever walk the planet, this should be enough.
The bigger counterculture names are just starting to realize that Gen X will be skipped over. You’re ahead of the curve.
You can’t understand love without experiencing God, Himself. The waters of life are a good place to start.
“It’s important to note that a covenant is not a contract that memorializes a transaction. It’s a solemn vow that establishes kinship. ”
I immediately thought of my wedding, and the way our wedding vows transformed unrelated people into a new family, so that definition strikes me as exactly right. It’s a scandal and a shame that as a society we have gotten so acclimated to the poison and violence of divorce. It’s a wound that keeps on wounding, with multiple generations torn apart by divorce and “remarriage” and all the broken trust and divided loyalties that come with it.
Conservatives lost the war on marriage when they let themselves get suckered into calling it a contract.
You know who loves contracts? A certain angel who says, “All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.”
Good point. It’s the Devil who’s transactional.
“If you eat this, you will be like God.”
Marriage licenses drove much of this. The State took a fee and kept records, and then allowed judges to perform marriages, then allowed dissolution of same, then assumed responsibility for dividing up the spoils (including the children), and of course took a cut.
The Conservative lost the battle when they didn’t demand the State return Marriage and associated functions to the Church.
I think you are both right. Licensing, contracts, and divorce are all different expressions of the decision to treat a holy thing as common. In a word, we profaned holy matrimony. The way to set it right is to sanctify it again, in our hearts. The Catholics and others who practice it as sacrament have a shorter path to follow.
Back in the day when I thought that internet debates did anything, I spent a lot of time on forums getting into arguments about things like same sex marriage. My lead off point was always “encouraging traditional marriage has clear benefits for the common good, but same sex marriage does not.” Inevitably there would be a conservative who “helpfully” added “besides, same-sex couples should be able to get a contract that gives them all the same benefits of a marriage contract. They just shouldn’t call it marriage!”