A while back I wrote about a dream in which God told me to write about the things I know. This is one of those. I know it as a man who sat on his hands in church, and I know it as a man who spent graduate school studying emotion and missed the obvious. There is a prayer I have never prayed. As far as I can tell, Judas never prayed it either. By the end I hope you’ll agree that most of us don’t, and that this, not our bank accounts, is the real tragedy.

A while back my wife and I tried out a new church, a Baptist congregation where many people worshiped with their hands raised high. We went for several Sundays. My wife really liked it, and so did I. But I couldn’t get past the hands. I sat there feeling like a hypocrite, so uncomfortable that in the end we went elsewhere. This from the kid who, in elementary school, was almost always the first and often the only hand in the air. Somewhere between third grade and that sanctuary, I lost the ability to raise my hand without first asking what it would say about me.

So you can imagine my discomfort with Shane Claiborne, who talks about being in love with Jesus the way other people talk about the weather. I had been reading him alongside Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, planning a tidy post about the two of them. Then a Jars of Clay song I’d never much liked, “Love Song for a Savior,” came on while I was writing, and it undid me. Its first verse is a little girl talking to God in a field, with no self-consciousness at all. Its chorus doesn’t say I love you. It asks to be made to. Perhaps some of you can empathize with my difficulty. Notice how easy that is. We have no trouble feeling deeply uncomfortable about feeling deeply.

In The Chosen, a Pharisee named Shmuel gives Jesus a chance to explain his “hard teachings.” Jesus doesn’t soften them. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. Sell what you have and give to the poor. Narrow is the way, and few find it. The sheep on his right hand are the ones who fed, clothed, and visited. The goats on his left are not villains. They’re the rest of us.

The early church, by Claiborne’s reading and by the book of Acts, took this at face value. They sold property and held things in common. We don’t. Niebuhr’s five ways of relating Christ to culture are, with respect, five ways Christians have learned to make peace with that gap, and most of us live in the comfortable middle of them. Claiborne’s point is that what we call radical was meant to be ordinary. And we have more to protect than any generation before us. We eat fresh fruit in January, carry the world in a pocket, and live better than kings of old.

A philosopher named Harry Frankfurt argued that what makes us persons rather than clever animals is that we can have desires about our desires. A dog wants the steak. A person can want the steak and wish he didn’t. He can even want to want something he doesn’t want at all.

I went to graduate school to study emotion. Part of my work was on people who defend themselves against feelings they’d rather not have. It produced no insight and no publications, which in academia is the end of the road. What it did produce, to my lasting regret, was a catch phrase. Explaining to a younger student why I’d been a poor guest one evening, I said, “In situations like that, I’d like to care, but I don’t.” He laughed and promised to remember it. I’ve spent thirty years hoping he didn’t, because it was unkind, because it was true, and because I’d been studying the very thing it revealed and couldn’t see it.

Here is the point. It’s natural that we don’t want to be poor. That isn’t the tragedy. The tragedy is that we don’t want to want it, and so we never ask. We could pray for God to give us the desire to live as Jesus directs, and I believe he’d answer. But that prayer requires admitting the gap exists, and we are very good at arranging not to feel it.

I’ve written before about the silence of Abraham, who marched his son up a mountain without once asking God, Are you sure? And about Adam and Eve, who heard a serpent claim that God was holding out on them and never once took the claim to God. Nobody asked, Is it true? They just moved their trust to a stranger with a theory. God was right there, walking in the garden. Nobody raised a hand.

The Chosen portrays Judas as a sincere, ambitious disciple who grows impatient with how slowly the kingdom is arriving and tries to force the issue. It’s a guess, since the Gospels say little about his motives, but it fits his remorse. And it raises a question I can’t shake. If he was conflicted, why didn’t he pray for a clear head and a heart aligned with God’s? He had spent three years beside the man who taught the Lord’s Prayer. I suspect he had already decided. You cannot ask God to make you want something you’ve concluded he doesn’t really want either. Judas’s hand was in the dish with Jesus that night. It never went up.

We goats, the most of these, with our insatiable appetite to sustain and improve our quality of life, are doing a number on the world and on the poor who live in it. I’ve argued the particulars elsewhere. What I’ll say here is that what’s needed isn’t a change of mind. We already know. It’s a change of heart, and hearts don’t change by argument.

Claiborne’s changed by proximity. He went to Calcutta, worked beside Mother Teresa among the dying, came home to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and stayed. The love came after the going. That is what falling in love with Jesus means. Not a feeling you manufacture, but one that arrives when you stand where he said he’d be.

This blog has a tagline: open your mind, open your heart, open your arms. You’ve seen in this post that I’m good for the first and shaky on the other two. My mind has been open for decades. My heart I guard, and I was trained to. And my arms, the one time it counted, stayed folded while everyone around me lifted theirs.

Here is the real reason. When the hands go up during the music, it feels to me like we’re celebrating a battle already won. There is enormous truth in that, and I don’t want to be glib about the cross. But I can’t see the battle as won, for two reasons. We are living unsustainable lives; when that catches up with us is debatable, whether it does is not. And in that dream I mentioned, the strongest impression I carried out was of a God who seemed heartbroken. If the battle is won, why is he heartbroken?

So I’ve come to see the atonement as a divine eraser. It wipes the board and lets us start from square one. It does not stop us from writing the same things again, or from wrecking the earth and the poor who live on it. What it makes possible is a different kind of heart, one that can see what we’ve written and feel it, if we ask. Ezekiel heard God promise both in one breath: I will cleanse you, and I will give you a heart of flesh. The eraser is the first. The heart is the second, and it is offered, not installed.

When I was a boy, a raised hand was a request to be called on, and being called on is a risk, because then you have to speak in front of everyone. I took that risk because I knew the answer. Now I’d like to take it for the opposite reason.

The tragedy is not that we don’t love the least of these, or the world we’re wearing out. That was never going to come naturally. The tragedy is that we don’t ask for help loving them, and the help has been on offer since Ezekiel. The challenge is to admit the gap and raise a hand into it. And the way to meet the challenge is the only prayer I know how to pray honestly: Lord, I can’t love what you’ve asked me to love. Help me want to.

That’s what I want my hand to say next time, if I can manage to raise it. Not I know. Not even I feel. Just: Here I am. I don’t have it. Call on me anyway.

Open my mind. Open my heart. Open my arms. Lord, I can’t manage the last two on my own. Help me love what I can’t.