Seeking and Finding God’s Love

Seeking and Finding God’s Love

Michael Curry writes: Sometimes it’s hard to feel God’s Love in our everyday lives, especially when life gets turned upside down.  In these times we can’t always feel the Divine Presence and we don’t always have a chorus of angels playing background music when chaos descends. 

But there is good news says Michael Curry. There is a simple way to connect to the Divine anytime you need to. If God is love and love is an action, he says you’ve only got to get out there and do it.  He adds, you’ve also got to get out there and receive it.  And the easiest way to do that he says is to become part of a community of people whose aim and purpose is to give and receive love.  In fact, every day says Michael Curry provides an opportunity to give and receive love as long as you’re not living in isolation. But if you’ve got a loving community, it becomes that little bit easier to be in touch with God’s Love. 

Bishop Curry writes that community has been an important way in which he has come to know and experience God’s Love.  His early experience of that love came first when his mom became sick and then when she finally died.  It happened in stages, firstly when she had a stroke and ended up in a coma. They couldn’t visit her because children weren’t allowed in the hospital.  But in the midst of that time, a community of people came around their family to begin to support them.  

He writes that his mother never did wake up from her coma. For years they visited her. Sometimes she would open her eyes, and it would seem like she was still with them, especially in the earlier years. But eventually her body began to shut down.  He says that the memory of her death is vague, but he has a vivid memory of the cemetery on the day she was buried. It was the moment when he finally realised his Mom wasn’t coming back.  The day was icy cold, and as they lowered her body into the ground he started crying.  He was standing next to Mrs Bullock who pulled him in to herself as she rocked him back and forward. He remembers rubbing his cheek on the soft scratchy hairs of her wool coat as she rocked him.  

He writes that the way Mrs Bullock pulled him in, her coat becoming a soft landing for a boy’s suffering – this was how he and his family lived through the whole period of his mom’s sickness and her death, resting in the loving hands of their church community, which by extension were in fact God’s hands.  

After his mom was buried they gathered at someone’s house for a meal. And he remembers his grandmother looking around the room at the Bullocks, Josie Robbins (who I spoke about last week) and all the rest who were gathered there, and in her Baptist way, she said: “You know where the Spirit of the Lord is when you see people love”.  And she shook her head and smiled. 

God’s Love is indeed experienced in loving community.  

In our Gospel passage today, Jesus reminds us of the importance of this… In chapter 15:9 he begins: As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 

One of the ways we can abide in God’s Love is through loving community. And this is what Jesus is pointing to in verse 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you”.  He is encouraging his disciples to nurture the bonds of loving community – to create a community built around the loving way of Jesus.  

And that is the value of going to church.  I have often heard it said by people that they don’t go to church because you can find God in other places, and especially in nature. And in a way they are absolutely right.  God can indeed be found in nature.  Psalm 98 echoes this: Make a joyful noise all the earth; break forth into joyous songs… let the sea roar and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it… Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy. 

We should all be making time to find God in nature… if you look, indeed You will find God there.  But sometimes you also need to feel God through flesh and blood, through a warm smile and a hug, and that is why church community can be so valuable. 

Bishop Curry writes that God may be the source of Love, but people are often the vessels of that Love.  When we create a community of love for ourselves and others, he says God shows up, and we find ourselves resting in God, experiencing God’s Love.  Not all church communities manage to create communities of love. Sometimes churches fail miserably.   There is no perfect church community. I am quite sure there have been times when this church community have failed to be places of love and care, where some members may not have experienced love and care and as a result they have drifted away.  It takes effort to nurture a community of love and not simply become a private inward looking club.  

It is also not to say that you can’t find loving community outside of a church, of course you can, but there is something about a faith community that stand in a unique position, because faith communities are places in which we can find rituals of comfort that connect us with a deeper, wider and more universal Love, the Love of God.  The Church has been practising this for centuries, providing rituals of faith and rituals of comfort when normal words are inadequate.  

Michael Curry writes that While his mother was sick, his family never stopped living the rituals of faith, whether they felt like it or not. His father never missed a church service, and not simply because it was his job as an episcopal priest. Michael Curry writes: I think that is why we prayed good and long each time they visited his Mom – because they didn’t know what else to do.  He writes: Those words – Oh help us heavenly father – carried us when we couldn’t carry ourselves. We rested in God’s hands. 

Community is love, he writes, and intentional spiritual practice provide the scaffolding that makes it even stronger. And having experienced this kind of community especially when his mom was in a coma and later when she died, he says that he did not conclude that the world was a broken bitter and ruthless place, for despite the pain and the grief, he found that he was not abandoned… he was in fact loved. And if he wasn’t abandoned, then neither was his mother, for she was also resting in God’s hands.  

In Luke’s Gospel, the last thing that Jesus says, is not “My God my God why have your forsaken me” as we read in Mark’s Gospel. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus last words are, “Father,  into your hands I commend my spirit”.  They are words from Psalm 31 that Jesus would have known well from growing up with the psalms being read regularly in synagogue. In his dying moments, in agony, Michael curry writes that Jesus leans on the spiritual tradition that had nurtured him. Those words bubble up and carry him through. He rested in God’s hands. 

And he felt that this was true also for his Mom. She was also resting in God’s hands. None of us know how it all works he says. We don’t know everything. But from being connected with a faith community, this we do know: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” 

Bishop Curry writes that Resting in God’s hands through being part of a community of love is more than just going to a place of worship. It does require active participation – being willing to be involved, to ask for help and being open to receive it when it is offered.   You can go there he says, but you still have to do love, putting yourself out there with all the vulnerability that it requires.  And indeed, you don’t have to be in a faith community to do these things – You can do these things anywhere, but as Michael Curry says: It takes a lot more courage outside of a community of faith.  

There are not a lot of places of community in this world where people can find love and support.  A few years ago I was speaking to a father whose son was under-going cancer treatment. And he became part of a whats-app group of other parents who were experiencing the same thing. What struck him was that for most of the people on the group, this was the only place where they were receiving love and support. Most of them didn’t belong to a faith community and therefore didn’t have the love and support of such a community.  He realised in that experience what a gift his own faith community was. 

There is a real danger that Churches are dying and many may go extinct.  There continue to be records numbers of churches in England that are closing there doors and having to sell their properties.  The phrase comes to mind: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”  We should not take our faith communities for granted. If we nurture our faith communities as communities of love, they will be places in which we can rest in God’s hands.  

Thank you for being part of this faith community, even if your only contact with us is online.