Lukewarmness

IT’S the spiritual illness that’s the most common, but the most hidden and the most vicious. It continually self-mutates to adapt to changing conditions of the persons. Its most perverted effect is to make one think he’s ok spiritually, when in reality he’s far from it.

The name must have come from a passage in the Book of Revelations which says: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit you out of my mouth.” (3,16)

A spiritual writer describes it as “a sort of spiritual languor which saps the energies of the will, inspires one with a horror for effort and thus leads to the decline of the Christian life.”

Its other names are mediocrity in work, sluggishness, passivity, complacency. It is very much allied to selfish calculations and maneuverings in one’s relations. Its manifestations are endless. To cite a few—

- Having a bourgeois lifestyle; tendency to pass tasks and assignments to others; lack of interest in prayer; avoiding self-examination to evade ‘complications’ that can come from greater self-knowledge.

- Getting stuck with the externals, the formal and the social, without the necessary basis in the internal and the personal; proneness to activism instead of work that is sanctified and that sanctifies.

- Propensity to put conditions to any request made of him; seeking compensations always; habitual irritability; penchant for negative judgments on others often expressed in jokes or light conversational comments. As they say, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.”

- Mistaking efficiency for effectivity, quantity for quality; frequent forgetfulness that stems from lack of seriousness in one’s duties; incapacity to do things with generosity and gratuitousness; flippancy and loquacity…

Lukewarmness is actually self-love. It’s just self-seeking. It’s not real love. It’s not the love God has meant for us, the one he shares with us, the one Christ referred to when he commanded us to “Love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 13,34)

Thus, lukewarmness distorts love. It’s loving not in God’s terms but in one’s own exclusive terms. It’s a loving that springs from one’s self-justifying reasons.

It always likes to mask itself as loving, and is skillful at it. That’s why, not only can it hold a person hostage, it can effectively captivate peoples and societies and cultures.

We need a strong and jolting reality check to wake us up from this predicament. First we need to be rescued from the mainstream idea that true love is what comes simply from one’s heart, but not necessarily from God. It’s more a matter of feelings, of what pleases and satisfies one’s longing.

This, to me, is the very virus responsible for lukewarmness. Human love in all its forms can only be true love if it flows from the love of God. Our problem is that we seem to be helplessly infatuated with our own kind of love.

It’s a love that is averse to making sacrifices, the touchstone of genuine love. Our challenge is how to convince everyone of the intrinsic fallacy of this kind of love.

Our love, by definition, stems from the exercise of our freedom. In fact, love is our full expression of freedom. But this freedom is a gift from God, our Father and Creator. It can only be exercised with him, in him and through him. He is the beginning, pattern and end of love.

This freedom, this love was already given to us in Adam and Eve. But after their fall, after their sin which we now inherit, that freedom and love needed to be cured and brought back to its proper orbit.

Christ did that through the Cross, which summarized and culminated all that he did to redeem us. In fact, we ought to understand that Christ, and especially Christ on the Cross, is the standard to follow in learning to love truly. He shows us how to give oneself all the way.

We have to find powerful arguments and examples to transmit the truth that only in the cross of Christ can true love and freedom be found. Without that cross, we have every reason to suspect the authenticity of what we claim as love and freedom.

We obviously need all the supernatural and human means to do this. We have to pray, make sacrifices, study the doctrine, develop the virtues, avail of the sacraments, give good example, do apostolate, etc. to do this.

That’s why we ought not to be lukewarm.