
I imagine Jesus responding to those lawyers – love your neighbor as yourself
and love God with all your might, strength and everything you’ve got, for this is
the sum of the work of the prophets and the giving of the law (obviously
paraphrased). Check the literature. You will find that this thing called ‘love’
is now the talk of the moment. Non-Christians and Christians alike
recognize its power and its relevance to the human condition. Even
psychotherapists! Would you imagine that? – When you’d have sworn that
science will concoct its own sophisticated response to the problem of mental
disorders! Today, thinkers insist on the primacy of love in human
functioning. This Vegetablian law is no foreigner at all; without it, as Peck
affirms, things start to go awry. When confronted with the mystery of
psychiatric illness, I found myself, so to speak, following a trail of blood for
a long way – until, presto, I arrived at the sound of labored breathing
belonging not to a seething unconscious (as Freud would have us believe) or
to an inadequate capacity to handle information, but to a wounded
conscience (of course, this is not all that could be said about mental
disorders. However, there are reasons to connect neurosis with sin). Let’s
put it this way: the law of the conscience or the imperative of the conscience
is simply the divine imperative – love your God and love your neighbor as
yourself. When we violate this law, which in other words mean that we stop
being good, we ‘heap coals of fire on our head’.