Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

The love which is proclaimed in many churches that worship the [American] dream carefully disregards the outcome of love. These churches speak of love as helping others, but they ignore what helping others does to the person who loves. They ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending, a real losing, a real deterioration of the self. They speak as if the person who is loving had no problems, had no needs . . . They say to people: “Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go and help the other people who are in need?” But they never go on to add “If you do this, you too will be driven into need.” By not stating the outcome of love they give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia where we can meet everyone’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves! And believe me, there are grown-up people who speak this kind of nonsense . . . [all this is the] illusion that some people can give without receiving, can nourish others without thereby becoming impoverished themselves—in short the illusion of perpetual affluence . . . the dreadfulness of this illusion lies in the fact that it is so inauthentic; it is so phony . . . If ever you approach a needy person with the illusion that you are a creature of purely bestowing love, then to that needy person you will seem totally alien, totally superior . . . Active love occurs within the fellowship of neediness, within the neediness of the one who serves and...