A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

April 2016

God of course addresses us in an astonishing range of languages, but most of us only hear a few of them. Let us start by going back to the five ‘love languages’ we humans use. It is an obvious but often not recognised truth, that God speaks most obviously and often through the love of other people. Every time we express our love to another through any of the five languages, God is touching them with Her love through us [whether recognised and named or not].

But God’s love languages encompass just about everything, for everything we are and have come as gifts. Humans can make nothing from nothing: we always have to start with something that has been provided, whether we acknowledge God as the Provider of these gifts or not. We brought nothing into the world and we will take nothing out of it. Let me offer a few examples:

1]  God’s love for us is expressed through the gift of life.

2]  We are born to human parents without who’s love and care we would not survive for long. Our parents are never perfect, but they mostly seem to be ‘good enough’ and their presence is an expression of God’s love for us, however imperfectly they may incarnate that.

3] God’s love is expressed through the fact that this world into which we are born provides us with everything we need: food, clothing, shelter, family. 

4]  God’s love is expressed through the gift of our wonderfully complex bodies, with which we are able to do amazing things.

5]  God’s love is expressed through the gift of our senses which enable us to see, hear, smell, touch, speak and communicate with each other.

6]  God’s love is expressed through the gift of our minds, with the range of consciousness that they offer us, including our own capacity to love and be creative.

7]  God’s love is expressed through the beauty of creation.

8]  God’s love is expressed the wonders of human creativity.

I could go on, but I have made my point, and you could easily add to it!! God speaks many ‘love languages’, we are surrounded by them, take them for granted, and fail to name them for what they are. Was it Meister Eckhart who said that if you can only manage one prayer then ‘Thank you’ would be sufficient.

We need not be dependent on just one of God’s love languages and we are not well served if we do so, because there will likely be times when it will seem to fail us. Better by far to be open to the God Who speaks in many languages, and Who’s love reaches out to us in so many different and varied ways. Both our vision of God and of love will be that much the greater.

If God speaks many languages then there cant be one ‘Word of God’ can there? Unless of course, its a word that appears in all of them, like love. So the Word of God is love. God is love, and wherever love is God is. The problem is that just as our vision of God is always too small, [how can it be otherwise?] so our vision of love is always too small. Yet life is constantly challenging us to leave our comfort zones and embrace a love strange beyond our current knowing. That of course is the message of Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan’, that love frequently comes to us in the guise of the action of someone whom we have learnt to see as the ‘enemy, the outsider, the one whom we find it difficult to love ourselves’. We shouldn’t be surprised that this is so. If God is a God of love, Who upholds all of creation with His love and loves all of Her children equally, then God’s love is inevitably going to be unable to refrain from keeping on breaking into our lives, challenging us to love where we find it hard to love, and to receive love from unexpected sources. Love has to keep on breaking down our barriers, confronting our fears, it cant not. If God is love, and creation is basically good, then reality is loving. 

Another thought occurs to me. Jesus commanded His followers to love one another: indeed He said that people should be able to recognise His followers by the way that they love one another. Of course He exemplified this teaching Himself: no word of condemnation for Judas or Peter or the others who abandoned Him, just acceptance, tolerance and words of forgiveness. He never commanded His followers to believe particular things or to hold particular points of view. Indeed, He was often frustrated by their failure to understand Him and by their constant misunderstanding of Him. But He seems to have embraced, accepted and loved them nevertheless. Love was more important to Him.  Jesus’ community was based on a love that rose above intellectual conformity, that accepted and transcended all manner of human differences. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if churches were like that, and to be fair some are. But all too often the churches that claim to speak in His name place doctrinal conformity above a Christ-like spirit of loving acceptance of differing opinions and practices. 

We can live with our many differences if we fulfil Jesus’ call to place primacy on loving one another. Why is this so difficult? We manage it with Christians from the past: they took views on a whole range of matters with which we would strongly disagree, but we accept them as fellow Christians and reckon some of them as saints. Why can we do this backwards through history but not in the here and now? Indeed why can we not see that this is of the essence of our calling as Christians, and indeed as human beings?