Toward Love Itself

• Christmas Eve Service are at 7pm
• We are open for Quiet Prayer on Christmas Morning from 9-10am
• Advent at Home with Owen and Charlotte arrives each week of Advent
• Enjoy the Recorded Reflection HERE

Today is Children’s Sunday, where we our Children lead us in song and story and poem to help celebrate the coming of Christmas Morning.

Our Advent Journey has brought us through the ups and the downs, through hope and peace and joy, to bring us to Love.  Sometimes, I think we make the mistake of trying to “get over” things or “get past” things.  Especially, the things that bring us despair and chaos and grief–those words that might be the opposing forces to hope, peace, and joy. We want to be done with them…ideally by not fully experiencing them.  Who wants to experience grief, despair, worry, chaos, fear?  Not a one of us. 

We want to get to Love and Love Itself, but we want to do it as ease-fully as possible.  But, perhaps Love, True Love, is only fully experienced by moving through the more challenging parts of life.  Those times of the opposites of hope and peace and joy.  We love more fully when we know what it means to lose what is most precious, to be in challenge.  We appreciate love more fully, when we have gone through the bouts of despair and grief and hurts that highlight our greatest hopes and joys.  

We are most able to fall into Love and into Love Itself, when we have moved through the chaos into a PeaceFullness that surpasses all understanding.  

Today, we light the candle of Love. The last of the candles of Advent.  Again, it doesn’t mean that hope and peace and joy have gone out.  It doesn’t mean that we do not despair or get embroiled in the chaos or fall into pains.  Love is highlighted by all of these things.  The times when we are in ease and the times when we are struggling.  

Love, the last of the Advent Candles is when we come to our Fullness as followers of the way of Jesus–one might argue that the Advent to Christmas journey is the entire Christian Journey told a different way, teaching us how to grow and live.  We learn to love through all of the trials and journeys of life.  The Love candle brings us to the very birth itself of Love.

The birth of the Love that can love the unlovable, forgive the unforgivable, and hold close the untouchable.  The birth of Love Itself.  The Beloved. The One Who Loves.  Love.  

I find that there are no words that can fully express this Love.  The love that echoes from the beginning of Goodness and the love that echoes and is awakened within us as we look into the heart of Love Itself.  When we look in the arms of Mary…that’s when the Goodness comes alive once again. The Goodness in us. The Goodness of this world.  The Goodness of the unfathomable.  This is when we are led toward what matters most in this precious gift of life.  And it is precious.  And every one of us is here in this time and this place for a purpose and loved by God (Universe-Spirit)–even in the times when we find it hard to love ourselves.    

The interwovenness of hope, peace, joy, and love on the journey of life and the Mystery of Grace, is like a circle that holds us in place while we move through the changes of life.  We are constantly brought back to, and anchored on, the circle of hope, peace, joy, and love…even as their opposites arrive and they will arrive.  Where there is hope and all that hope encompasses…there is also its opposites.  Where there is peace…there is also its opposites.  Joy and its opposites.  Love and opposites.  Perhaps the circle at this very beginning leads us back to what we must hold to, no matter what happens on our journey: hope, peace, joy, and love.  Just as Mary and Joseph do…

Perhaps is what the manger holds.  The wholeness of Love that is God (Universe-Spirit), that is the Christ-child and the Christ-of-the-Cross…the Compassionate One who teaches us to open our hearts to compassion and love…

Not just when it’s easy, but when the griefs are so painful we want to close our hearts not just to the world around us, but even to those we love the most for fear that we might feel this grief and pain again if we open our hearts.  

The one who teaches us to open our hearts to compassion and love when we are in despair and seeking to blame anything, everyone, even God, for our unbearable challenges.

The one who reminds us of love and tenderness when we want to lock ourselves and our weary hearts away where it is safe and sterile and no bad can come.  

Which is impossible and Love asks more of us than that.  Love asks us to love.  To lean into Goodness when we feel abandoned and alone.  To have compassion for those we fear the most and like the least.  

Love is the answer to, and within, the Mystery. It is our greatest calling…and while it may unfold from each of us in different ways…

We might Love by teaching the children, or playing the music, acting the play, or writing the story, or creating the art, or tending the plants, or sharing the books, or hugging the lost, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, tending the fearful, listening to the silent.  Welcoming the unwanted.  We might Love by bagging the groceries or taking out the garbage.  By being ready to come to the aid of others from fire and danger.  By driving the bus.  By warming the cold.  By protecting the forests and tending to the wild ones.  By drinking the tea, by reading the book.

..our love matters and being love matters.  

Our acts of love are both small and enormous.  We are both small and enormous.  In times when we feel lost, we might think of the candle of love, leading us to Love Itself, and remember that to Love against all obstacles, against all walls, against all anger, against all hate, against all worry, against all grief, against all despair is the most precious of gifts that we, each and every one of us, can bring into this world and to one another.  

May we look into the stable and see only Love and may that Love enfold us until we ripple with the waves of Love that cannot help but unfold and ripple into the world around us.  May we be the Guardians of Love.  The Love that is the Light within the manger that awakens us to lean toward hope and peace and joy and love…Always.