A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

April 1916

Some years ago I read a book that suggested that there are five different ‘languages of love’ that human beings use: five different ways of our expressing love towards another. I guess that others might come up with a different list, but it named the five as:

1] physical touch: ranging from a light touch on the arm through to sexual intercourse;
2] spoken words of affirmation, affection & encouragement;
3] practical actions of service: men of my parents generation with memories of the Depression often did paid work that they hated because it paid for a roof over their family’s heads, clothes on their backs and food on the table. Women of the same generation saw it as their loving duty to stay at home, do the domestic chores, care for the children, and make sure the house was ready for the return of their husbands after work, often at the neglect of themselves. Both were offering practical acts of service as a language of their love;
4] the giving of gifts; from the tiniest of gestures upwards;
5] time spent together: just being there for each other. Some say that being able to be silent and at ease in the company of another, is a sign of love.

The suggestion was that different people tend to favour one or two languages often to the exclusion of the others, either not valuing other languages of love for what they are or dismissing them entirely. I guess this might be the result of temperament, or upbringing. The result is that people who speak love languages other than the ones we favour ourselves are seen as not loving us, when the reality is that they are simply offering that love in a language we haven’t learnt to recognise or value.  The more languages we are open to, the more we will be aware that we are much more loved than we imagined, which would be a plus!. And the more languages we can learn to speak, the more loving we will become for each other.  Simple, when put like that, and it opened my eyes no end!

Now this seems to be transferable wisdom to our relationship with God. I have come to see that God’s love speaks to us in a range of different languages, many of which we simply don’t recognise for what they are, because we have never learnt to do so. And, the reverse is also true, namely that people express their love or worship of God in a whole range of different ways, but they have never been taught to see most of them for what they are.

This was brought home to me when I served for a time in a well to do parish with a large churchyard, it employed David from a nearby council estate to come and look after the churchyard on a couple of days each week. David, to my knowledge only ever entered the church itself once a year when he helped put up the Christmas tree, but he took meticulous and loving care, well beyond the call of duty, of the church yard. Some voices in the parish thought that I was failing in my duty by failing to encourage David to join us in our worship on a Sunday. But, watching him week by week I came to realise that his practical acts of service in the churchyard was the language in which he offered worship to God, [although I doubt that he would have ever put it like that].

Moreover the language we used for worship in church could not have been more alien to him: it involved words [he was a man of few words], books [ I doubt he read many books], singing [which I never witnessed him doing], sitting in rows facing the front as if in school [of which I doubt he had happy memories] and dressing up [which was not his style at all]. David and the church congregation were using different languages of love in addressing God.

I used to say that the door of the church should be wide enough to allow any to enter who wished to do so. I realised that it also needed to be wide enough for the folks inside to see those outside worshipping God in a multitude of different languages of love. It needed to be appreciated as a door that led to a place to worship God in both directions!

Once I had seen that I could see that vastly more people were worshipping God, without naming that activity as ‘worship’, than I had ever imagined. In principle everybody looking after a garden or an allotment, was engaged in ‘worship’, for example. And the principle could be extended to cover all manner of activities. Indeed, any activity done with love and a sense of reverence could qualify. You and I could find ourselves ‘worshipping God’ much, if not all, of the time.