Does Love Have What It Takes?

“Without a more profound human understanding derived from exploration of the inner ground of human existence, love will tend to be superficial and deceptive.” - Thomas Merton

Current US politics invite pondering of the question, “What’s happened to love?” When corruption, deceit, concentration camps, and lies are the engines behind governance, how can a topic like love even make it onto the table of discussion? Is love too mushy and soft to face off against violence and autocracy? Or is love the divine power by which a great correction will happen?

Call me Pollyanna, but I continue to hold out hope and belief that God has not yet abandoned Project Earth. Throughout the Bible’s 4,000-year history, societal cataclysms have threatened the sanity and well-being of humans on earth. So present times should not be considered any worse than humans have had to flounder through before. In Romans 8 (during another time period of armed calamity), Apostle Paul makes the audacious claim, “nothing can separate us from God’s love.” In 1 Corinthians 13, Apostle Paul again extols the virtues of Love. These references often get usurped to be syrup laid on in wedding ceremonies, but the honest references are not to romantic love, but rather to an abounding power or force that holds all creation together. Love is the substantive spiritual force that binds together our very existence, including civility, dignity, beauty, and joy-filled honor. Faith in such a love as this is not “superficial” nor “deceptive.” Love is sufficient to command a commitment to pursue the path of love and to do so without violence. Where violence arises, death reigns.

We believe in a God of Life. We must hold fast to that fundamental existential truth. We must stand arm in arm with love as the reminding shield against any forces of any empire that removes freedom, sustenance, care, and truth.

So, if we stand on a hill overlooking the battlefield plain spread out before us, we can easily see the forces of cruelty, greed, mayhem, and evil insanity. They are facing off against the forces with the greatest three spiritual gifts in their quivers: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. May we work diligently, each in our own Spirit-guided ways, to pray & act with “profound human understanding” to proselytize, teach, lure, and brandish Divine Love that holds cosmic powers over our world, while banishing all golden calves and false idols.

We Are The Words of Jesus

 One of the hobbies my father had when I was growing up involved finding quotes, and then he would "print" the quote on a piece of 1/4" plywood by gluing macaroni letters to it.  Then he would shellac it, and it would then be placed in various locations around our house. One of his plaques I remember said, "Be aware you may be the only Bible someone reads." 

That memory came to me as I was reading a devotional I'm using for Lent: A Book of Hours.  It is a week's collection of daily prayers compiled from Thomas Merton's writings.  If I had the plywood and macaroni letters, I would do this plaque tonight from this source:

"Contemplation is the response to a call: a call from Christ who has no voice, and yet who speaks in everything that is, and who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being, for we ourselves are words of his."

 In my Christian experience, this captures a valuable orientation for our faith, one that puts in sharp relief how politics, grievances, and corruption are moving people further and further away from the persona and teaching of Jesus. Many calling themselves "Christian" have badly forgotten how to be like Jesus. If we aren't modeling Jesus in our daily lives, can we really expect the world to improve? 

Is Lent All About Sorrow for Wrong?

 Lent has always carried an apparent purposefulness in creating sorrow, shadows of gloom & regret, and a wrestling of sorts with endings. With its popular association with self-denial and the giving up of favorite things, one can almost feel desert hermits flagellating themselves for enjoying their own breath.  Certainly, there is something to be said for taking time to reckon with one's enthrallment to society's penchant for consumer-driven individuality, the drive for money, and the lens through which something only has value if it has a price tag. Yet in Christ, that notion is clearly rejected. Also, all of us created in the image of God are not commodities to be jockeyed and traded like stocks on Wall Street.  There should be remorse sought for one's participation in such dehumanization.  But what troubles my spirit about the "sackcloth and ashes" and wailing over our sinfulness is how it gets left there for six long weeks. 

Christianity is not a faith about endings, at least it shouldn't be.  "In our end is our beginning."  That beginning doesn't wait for six weeks of bewailing our broken unworthiness. The hope in Christianity is not that evil will be purged and wiped from the earth if we just deny ourselves!  That perspective has spawned so much war, violence, and hate! No! The hope in Christianity is that we each possess a brilliant, golden-glowing seed of immortality graced to us by the Most Holy One, held in the outstretched hand of Jesus Christ. Take it! That is our beginning, and as such, there is no ending. 

As I age, I am aware of a subconscious thought that rises to the surface: my life is coming to an end.  Shouldn't I do something with the time I have left?  But what if the time I have left is infinite? Then what? What is the shame-proof faith-based calling you have? To whom has God always called you to be in league with to build God's realm on earth?  Do you really want to keep putting that off for another six weeks?