Even so, we are just now taking a breath with the first week of Ordinary times so this whole discussion might feel anticlimactic. When we realize that Lent is steaming in on us in just another 6 weeks, we might even further consider it is too late to take up this topic. Too bad. We are going to take it up anyway.
Why? The message of love we hear at Christmas is timeless and eternal but how we understand love changed completely with the birth of Jesus. The Hebrew people preached, lived and believed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses was a God who loved beyond all measure but it was a love of God for his people. There was missing part for us, the thing that makes God's love personal for us. In the person and divinity of Jesus, we as humans can relate to the nature of God even if it is far beyond our ability to understand.
The thing that has always puzzled me is how Jesus taught us to love. Yes, he told us to love on another. He challenged us to love God and devote ourselves completely to Gospel. What brought the message of love home, however, is found as much in what he did as what he said. In the miracles we saw the love expressed in a way that made it real. Even if we can dismiss the miracles as being something reserved for the divine, look how he related to the Samaritan woman. What keeps us from offering the same message of love? How about when he simply said, let the one without sin cast the first stone? How about the exchange with woman at the table when she requested he look past her foreign status.
Love is not a noun or a passive verb, it is an action word. To love means to act in a way that wills the good of another as Thomas Aquinas taught. I have been educated recently about how the service that flows from love really works. It is not just about feeding the poor or caring for the sick. For me it is much more close up and personal. I work in a job where I communicate with people who have been injured on the job. Instead of just robotically delivering a product or doing my job by rote, I can remind myself of the humanity of every single person I come into contact every hour of the day and that no matter the circumstances, I can do my job with love even if the message I have to communicate is not what the listener wants to here. I can treat my co-workers with love and charity, giving them of what I have which is sometimes more than I can begin to imagine is inside me to share
This causes me to reflect back over the past 40 years. Have I always acted with love guiding my actions? Hardly. That is not to say I have continually failed to be kind and understanding but sometimes the people who needed it most from me where the same ones I was most reluctant to treat with kindness and empathy.
In recent months, we have been hitting this spirituality thing pretty hard and we have dealt with difficult and complex emotions and relationships. Let's face it, I have been hitting myself and the rest of you with a hammer on weekly basis trying to understand the nature of fear, faith and trust which should all be centered on the Lord and not on our own weaknesses and insecurities. Also, humility has been a recurring theme I have been jabbing myself and the rest of us in the ribs about on a weekly basis. While we have to be ever mindful of our nature, we also need to look beyond the narrow confines of ourselves and look to the rewards we have for being believers with faith and trust.
In looking back over the Advent and Christmas season, I am filled with something I can only call wonder. Not wonder as I wonder but wonder as in awe. There are no boundaries to wonder, we can just let ourselves go and trust that it ok to just open our eyes and hearts and take it all in. The decorations, the music, the gatherings, the giving and receiving and the amazement we have at what happened 2000 years ago when the word was made flesh and God become incarnate in our world. Wonder creates room for gladness, appreciation, gratitude and a renewed faith in ourselves, the world, our place in the world and the Trinitarian God is in and through it all.
Wonder is one of the greatest gifts of God given us because of his love for us. He did not have to create beauty when function is all matters for the world to go around and around. He did not have to give us the ability to appreciate beauty but he did. In coming weeks we will come back to wonder from time to time as way of reminding us to just be sometimes because when we do that, we will always be in his presence.
Today, look up at the sky. Take note of the clouds and watch them for a moment so you might hear the song they are singing to you. Wonder and beauty. We can trust in God for those these things.
Next week we will move to the next step of wonder when we look at the 4 elements of creation in Celtic Spirituality.
Now I am going to give you all some homework. Take the sheet of paper I am passing out and write this down:
I experienced the wonder of God last week when I (fill in the blank)
Oh, and I also want you to work Love into your observation.
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