Category: Love

Powerlessness

At St Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne, England there is a stained-glass window depicting the last supper. It is about 140 years old. In the picture, Jesus is surrounded by his disciples, all blessed with handsome features and dressed in bright colours with gold halos above their heads. In stark contrast, Judas, his betrayer, is wearing a dark coloured cloak, has an ugly face, flame coloured hair and holds a bag of money in his grasping left hand. Most telling of all is the black halo above his head.

Judas has long fascinated me. Not with the aim of excusing him or trying to rehabilitate him but to understand what lay behind the decision to betray his friend and once he had, what options remained. A previous blog has looked at this (Pathways: Restoration instead of Despair; April 2020). What has intrigued me this Easter is less about the pathway of Judas, and more about Jesus and how he coped with the betrayal by his friend and his experience of increasing powerlessness through this betrayal as he journeyed from arrest to trial and execution.

Throughout his life, Jesus consistently showed the way of love – to all those he met along the way and most especially to his close group of twelve disciples with whom he spent the final three years of his life. At the last supper he shows this love in a symbolic act of service when he first washes their feet and then shares in a meal where he talks of his impending death. He knows Judas is about to leave and betray him and Judas knows Jesus knows, yet he still does it. The love of Jesus reaches out, but he is powerless to stop Judas. Love is like that. The families of addicts know this only too well. How many parents, children or partners of addicts have loved and reach out in love, desperately hoping that this will be enough to draw their loved back to sobriety, back to sanity, back to them. But they are powerless to stop them, all they can do is love, and that brings with it immense pain and sorrow.

In the story of the last supper, John responds to Jesus’ prediction of betrayal at the hands of one of their number by asking him who it will be. Jesus indicates that it is Judas. Throughout the gospels, the disciples seem to display a high level of crassness and misunderstanding about whatever Jesus says and I’ve always assumed that in this instance John, (and probably Peter too who overheard what Jesus said about betrayal) simply didn’t understand what he meant. But on reading the story again, it now seems obvious that this wasn’t the case; they did understand, yet they did nothing. This is shocking. The anguish which Jesus felt about Judas’s impending betrayal must have been compounded by an immense sense of bewilderment and perhaps an even greater sadness that Peter, John and any others who’d overheard the conversation did nothing to stop Judas. He’d loved them all fully yet at this point, each of them betrayed Jesus in some way by their indifference and passivity.

Soon, as the story shifts to the arrest of Jesus and his trial, Jesus becomes physically powerless in the hands of the Roman authorities, initiated and urged on by the religious leaders. But at this point he is experiencing a different sort of powerlessness – his powerlessness to influence and change the people he knew and loved. We know that this is not the end of the story and that ultimately, they do change – that is, everyone but the tragic Judas who takes his own life before the love of Jesus can finally break through. But today, Maundy Thursday we stay with Jesus and stand in solidarity with all whose love is powerless to change the behaviour or circumstances of someone they love. Despite everything – the hurt and sadness, the suffering and confusion, the rejection, doubt and despair, they stick by their loved one and continue to offer them love and hope. We give thanks for these people.  We pray for them too because they continue to love against all the odds. Love is never easy and it’s costly, but ultimately, it’s the only way to bring healing and life to others and to ourselves too, remembering that we love because God first loved us. Whether we know it or not, it’s this love of God which helps us to keep on loving others.

Hope at Christmas

This guest contribution is written by Revd Pauline Shelton

‘‘God wants us to know that God loved us before God even made us, and this love has never diminished and never will. Powerful truths written by Mother Julian of Norwich, a remarkable woman who lived around 750 years ago in Norwich, England at a time of plague, riots and war with France — some things never change! That’s what God wants us to know — love, love and more love.

Really? You may be thinking. Where have you been this last year? Don’t you realise how awful2022 has been? There’s war in Ukraine — and a madman in the Kremlin. In Pakistan, floods devastated a third of the land. In Somalia, drought threatens the lives of millions, whilst rising sea-levels threaten the very existence of small oceanic countries. And closer to home, we have Covid, avian flu, and ‘normal’ winter flu, not to mention strikes — while figures show that the gap between rich and poor in Britain is wider than ever. In 2021, the richest 10% of households owned 44% of all wealth, while the poorest 50% owned just 9%. Scandalous. And more and more people are driven to food banks and to desperation.

But I refuse to despair. I won’t give way to the prevailing discourse that all is just getting worse and worse, even though that is how it often feels. Why? Well, it’s summed up in a verse at the start of John’s Gospel – ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’. The literal translation of that is, ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us’. Only the very poorest live in tents. Tents are rarely permanent homes. They offer very little protection from the weather, or from thieves. God chose not only to become human, but to live among us in a marginal and vulnerable place — in temporary accommodation, in a tent on the edge of society.

And that’s summed up in the word ‘incarnation’. Incarnation means this extraordinary truth that God becomes human. And though at Christmas we may bless a crib or sing carols about mangers, shepherds and angels, the hope that I want to share with you isn’t just about a massive baby-fest. It’s not just confined to Bethlehem, and winter snows, stars and stables, beautiful and moving though all of that is.

Incarnation is about a change in the very heart and mind of God. It is about God deciding no longer to remain distant from the vulnerable world, the mess and fears and muddle and disease of the flawed and fallible people created and loved by their Maker. Instead, incarnation is about God deciding to enter into the midst of our tensions, our political injustices, our poverty and need — to enter into solidarity with wonderful and broken humanity.

It’s as if God said, ‘What if . . .?’

What if, instead of staying within the boundlessness of eternity, I accept the limitations of time and space?

What if, rather than be a disembodied Spirit, I limit myself to the physical body and intellectual capacity of a human being?

What if I come to earth not as the super-gifted child of an aristocratic family, but am parented by people who have no status, no secure home?

What if, rather than being educated at an exclusive fee-paying school, I learn about life through 30 years of anonymity?

What if, instead of being Superman, I make myself vulnerable — vulnerable to pain, to prejudice, to slander, to disease, and to the loss of credibility because of what I say and who I mix with?

What if, instead of choosing elite graduates from Oxford, Cambridge or Ivy League Universities I pick my companions from a random group of tradespeople, unskilled workers, social misfits — and at least one who is totally untrustworthy?

What if, rather than repeating safe cliches as a tele-evangelist, or from the safety of the pulpit six feet above contradiction, I talk face-to-face with real people about the forgotten and disregarded truths about life, faith and social justice in ways that will make religious people so angry that they’ll plot to kill me?

What if all I say and do to save the world by my life, my love and my example leads to hatred and rejection? And what if, rather than returning to the safety of heaven, I accept death, crucifixion — a sentence reserved for those whose love, honesty and integrity are too much for the powers-that-be to bear?

And what if, when I am dead, I don’t stay lying down?

What if that is what Christmas is really all about? And what if we see again this Christmas that Jesus comes among us, not to fix everything as if by magic, but to be in total solidarity with us. To be with us in all the messiness of our lives. To be part of the joys of today and tomorrow — and a part of the tensions and anxieties too. Jesus comes to be part of those, and to show us a truer way of being human. The incarnation is God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus the Christ. The one born as a baby who pitches his tent in our garden, our yard, our street, our lives — so that incarnation keeps on happening, love keeps on flowing down the ages, always abundant, always pouring from the very heart of God.

Our grief, our pains, our troubles, our addictions, our worries, our loneliness are not the end. Thanks to what starts at Christmas they can be the birth pains of something unspeakably better.

‘The Word became flesh and blood and pitched his tent among us.’

‘‘God wants us to know that God loved us before God even made us, and this love has never diminished and never will.’

May the life of the Christ-child given for this broken and beautiful world be born anew in us this Christmas and always.

With grateful thanks to Revd John Bell, Minister in The Church of Scotland and until recently a member of the Iona Community for his idea of the “What if..” within both Advent and Christmas.

On the Frontline – learning from Covid

It now feels like a very long time ago that Coronavirus so rudely kicked down the front doors of our comfortable, stable, well-planned lives and unceremoniously marched on in.  At long last, nearly eighteen months later, many of the worst affected countries are finally lifting their lockdowns and easing the various restrictions put in place to limit the virus’s rapid and seemingly relentless spread. It is noticeable, however that this gradual relaxation has been accompanied by signs of the usual human tendency to forget what we’ve been through and the lessons we thought that we’d learned, as we rush headlong to bury ourselves once again in what Heather King calls “the low-level anaesthetic haze of distractions and false gods.” There’s an old Irish blessing which says, “May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten.” Maybe now is a good time for us to take stock and reflect on the things that we thought we’d learned during the Covid Pandemic but are now in danger of forgetting. We need to remember what is worth remembering.

Over the first six months of the pandemic there was a lot of talk about both love and suffering. Love was perhaps most clearly seen in the work of many of the frontline health and social care staff whose self-sacrificing care for the ill, lonely and dying went far beyond their job descriptions or professional expectations. Other essential workers, all too often the lowest paid people in our communities served us with immense dedication and love, keeping shelves stocked, food supplied, garbage cleared, fuel flowing and transport running. With schools and workplaces shut, families suddenly found themselves living close to one another 24/7 which required them to discover new depths of love, patience and tolerance. Love was also to be seen in many small acts of kindness for others in need in the community. People looked out for neighbours who were old or vulnerable, significant increases were seen in donations and contributions to local food banks and meal services, help was offered to those who could not manage. Little kindnesses of many sorts abounded. We discovered the truth of Mother Theresa’s words: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” Communities flourished and we dreamed of a greener, cleaner, more loving world.

The virus also caused much suffering too. Not just the premature and often painful death of nearly four million people world-wide, but also those who were acutely ill and survived, as well as relatives who suffered as their loved ones died alone and without the opportunity to say a final goodbye. Those who have developed ‘long-covid’ continue to suffer in painful and extreme ways.  Elsewhere, many people with other health conditions suffered from temporarily inferior services and slower treatment as resources were shifted to fighting the virus. And all around us the poor, those in overcrowded living conditions, those in households where there was domestic violence, suffered even more than normal. Some experienced a double or triple whammy of these and other sources of suffering.

The majority of us, may not have experienced such extremes and instead found ourselves stuck in the lockdown hinterland of reduced options, dull routines and loss of purpose as its duration dragged on beyond any of our expectations. We just longed to get back to normal, whatever that new normal would look like. Yet, our eyes had been opened to a global vulnerability, and maybe we’d never have quite the same self-assuredness ever again.

Love and suffering have always been the most significant means by which we achieve spiritual growth. People in recovery know this and Jesus taught and consistently lived this truth. Addiction itself causes “acute and constant” suffering to both the addict and those around them and arguably the turning point is when the prolonged suffering caused by the addiction becomes too great to carry on. As the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions says, “Until now, our lives had been largely devoted to running from pain and problems. We fled from them as from a plague.  We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering. Escape via the bottle was always our solution. Character-building through suffering might be alright for the saints, but it certainly didn’t appeal to us.”

The road to recovery is painful. The simple fact of living without a substance or process that we have always relied upon and having to stand without it, emotionally naked before the world is hard. Recovery is also painful because it requires change, most significantly the loss of ego which comes from our surrender. But wherever there is pain and suffering, love is usually there too, lurking in the shadows in the form of other people for whom this is a way of living and service. As the Big Book of AA says, “Love and tolerance of others is now our code.” In twelve step recovery, people find themselves drawn to others by acts of love; the duty which begin as a requirement of the programme ultimately develops into a way of life for the individual who gradually becomes loving and giving rather than selfish and taking.

The single most important message of Jesus was that God loves each of us and as a result will do anything to bring us back into his light. Anne Lamott says, “Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.” The two great commandments of Jesus urge us to love the Lord God with all our heart, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. No soft, sentimental love this, but a diamond hard centre of being, made so by the intense forces of costly self-sacrifice and suffering. As children of God we are to fill our lives with such love for God and others. Never one to ask anything of others that he did not do himself, Jesus lived this love to the full and experienced the process of dying to self. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it cannot bear great fruit.” His brutal death brought great love and extreme suffering together in one final cataclysmic yet ultimately triumphant event.

None of this is news to most regular readers of this blog and certainly not to anyone with a strong recovery from addiction or Christian faith. One of the golden threads running through both is that love and suffering are our great teachers. But because we sometimes lose focus and our ego seeks to reassert itself from being in its rightful place and constantly tries to Edge God Out, it always pays to do a spiritual health check on how we’re doing, remembering that we so easily fall prey to self-deception. No time is better for doing this check than right now when things are starting to return to “normal.”

As I’ve said previously in these blog posts, I’m a real coward and will do my utmost to avoid pain and suffering if I can, but I am also a realist who knows it’s a fact of life and that somehow, at some point it will come knocking. In the meantime, whether suffering or not, we can always work at being better at loving others. So, the question is, each day, how can we better love those around us, not just by what we do but also by what we don’t do. Not saying the unkind, uncharitable things but only speaking words that encourage, build up and bring life. Giving the nicest and the best – not just the cheapest or most convenient, sharing the things we hold dear, sacrificing our time, comfort and ease. It’s the kind of love which has no price tag on it. Such love is steady and slow work, changing us without us ever knowing it’s happening. Life may sometimes feel dull or purposeless but the challenge to love those around us means that each day and in every situation, we are all called to be frontline workers. “Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and in the life to come.” (Henri Nouwen)

Serving Others – humility and sacrifice

Recently I heard a news report about a politician who was standing down from office. “He has served his community for more than thirty years”, the reporter said. It set me to thinking about service and what it really means, because whatever contribution politicians make, service is not a word I associate with an activity so based around the desire for and wielding of power. Many of the “services” we now receive are delivered by large organisations with rigid hierarchical power structures for the thousands of people they employ to “serve” us, be they health, military, police, national, regional or local government. Whilst as institutions they do of course serve our needs for health, safety, protection, amenities and so on, true service and servanthood is something very different. It’s marked by humility, self-sacrifice, disregard for power, preferring the interests of the other, generosity and self-effacement. There are undoubtedly some individuals in the large service organisations who do serve in this way, but the majority appear to do it primarily for the paycheque, the power, the prestige or for a combination of these things.

Jesus was truly revolutionary in his approach to power and authority. Though servant leadership is a term that has only been used in the last 50 years or so, Jesus introduced his followers to the principles two thousand years ago. It was incredibly radical. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” (Matthew 20 26-28). Jesus’s words were lived out in his life, where he consistently expended himself for others, but perhaps his notion of service is most clearly displayed in his washing of the disciples’ feet on one occasion shortly before his death. This was a menial, despised job, not something for a leader, let alone a king. And he washed the feet of all of his disciples, including Judas who was about to betray him.  Followers of Jesus should, as he said, seek to serve people and not lord it over them. Service is never about power, pride or status.

Service is very important in 12 step recovery. The early pioneers understood the paradox within the teachings of Jesus that “we must give it away if we are to keep it”. All within fellowships are there to serve, recognising that service is essential to recovery. The Twenty-Four Hours a Day book author likens recovery without service to the Dead Sea. It is service which keeps us fresh and alive. And service, as Bill W says, is “anything whatever that helps us to reach a fellow sufferer — ranging all the way from the Twelfth Step itself to a ten-cent phone call and a cup of coffee.” Serving is a way of looking beyond our ego driven selves to consider the needs and struggles of others, so teaching us a different way of living.

One of the many amazing things about the 12 step programme is the way in which it operates with the minimum of power – positions are temporary and always done as a service to help others and to help one’s own recovery. As Tradition Nine says, “We create Service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve”. In A.A. groups, these trusted servants are sometimes called “officers” and usually are chosen by the group for limited terms of service. Tradition Two says, “Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.” These service positions may have titles. But titles in A.A. do not bring power or status, they simply describe roles and responsibilities. Chairing a 12 step meeting is both a service opportunity and a unique chance to practice the principles learnt in A.A, especially one of humility. It’s been said that most mistakes made by a chairperson arise from a false feeling of ego, power or control which simply shows that they have more to learn about humility.

Given that Jesus declared that the path to greatness lies in humble service, it is surprising how consistently the Christian church is based upon positions of power and authority and how many individuals within the church have been caught up in the pursuit of this power. All too often we see signs of abuse of power, with pride in positions of status and prestige clothed in false humility. It is remarkable that the heady attraction of power and the ever-present pitfalls from our personal weaknesses have been so consistently disregarded, given that Christianity in all its forms is based on a common belief in our human fallibility and sinfulness. Churches lack the built-in safeguards which the founders of A.A. inspirationally put in place for their meetings and structure. As a result, whereas 12 step organisations and their overall structures are upside down, with ultimate responsibility and final authority for services residing with the groups, the church is a traditional pyramid structure with power generally resting at the top. Ironic really, because Jesus heavily criticised the religious power pyramid of his time and the Kingdom of Heaven he spoke of, is very much an upside down, topsy turvy model of living.

As they say, it is what it is, so as followers of Jesus we have to work with what we’ve got and the way that things are. Our job is to put into practice the things he taught, loving our neighbour as ourselves, so we serve without expecting anything in return whether that be awareness, reward or recompense. As Jesus showed too, we serve those who are opposed to us as well as those who do not value or appreciate what we do. We need to be very, very wary of power and find some way to build in our own personal checks and safeguards if we are in positions of power and prestige. Hard as all of this may be, we must trust that as we do seek to serve with genuine humility and as we show love through this service, it creates ripples which extend far beyond us. “To keep it you have to give it away,” and by giving of ourselves we not only advance the Kingdom of God, but somehow, miraculously, we are fed and become full ourselves.

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. Jesus of Nazareth

The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy. Mahatma Gandhi

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness. Leo Tolstoy

What brings you closer to God is being in service to others. Any religion or spiritual way of life will indicate that service to others will lead to a connection with a higher power.  Anonymous

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? Vincent Van Gogh

 

Mercy, Mercy – radical kindness to all

I’ve recently completed an annual spiritual practice that I do at the same time every year. It’s a long way from a desert retreat or 30-day Ignatian spiritual exercises (and a lot cheaper too) but my day of learning never fails to teach and remind me about important things in life. About acceptance and compassion, but especially about mercy.

I live just a mile or so away from the route of the Great North Run, the biggest half marathon in the World, which began in 1981.  I ran in the first three and in several others since, but I am no longer running. As a club runner I trained hard and prided myself on achieving the best times I could, always striving to do better. Whenever I wasn’t running, I’d go along to watch, seeing the elite athletes and supporting the club runners who I knew. I didn’t bother to stay and watch the fun runners who were running at a more sedate pace. After I stopped running, I no longer went to watch the race, but over the last few years I’ve started to go along again and now watch all of the runners go past. I tend to go to a point close to the Tyne Bridge where they’ve run about 2 miles. I started to cheer on runners I didn’t know, calling out their names or those of the charity for whom they were running to raise money and trying to encourage them. But I found myself introducing a very rigid (and unlovely) selection process as to who I’d cheer for. I would never cheer on anyone walking so early in the race. They didn’t deserve my encouragement nor did the ones who clearly hadn’t trained. Even those jogging ever so slowly got my cheers and words of support. And I’d pick my preferred charities – the bigger more organised ones seemed less deserving than the small ones.

When I discovered that I was doing this, I was quite shocked, even more so when I discovered it went very deep. I applied this mean-spirited, conditional and judgemental approach to a lot of other situations and people I came across, not just fun runners, but including of course, judgements about myself. It seems that I’m not alone in this sort of thinking. As Brennan Manning observed in his book The Wisdom of Tenderness, each of us lives in a world of our own, the world of our own mind. “How often we’re narrow, cold, haughty and unforgiving. Above all else we are judgmental, happy to believe appearances, impute motives and interpret behaviours with nothing but the slightest scraps of evidence to back it up.”

Jesus was very clear about the wrongness of this behaviour. In the story of the Good Samaritan, answering the question as to who our neighbour is, Jesus shows that the real neighbour is the one who cared for the beaten man and showed him mercy. The Samaritan may have had a host of reasons for not helping the victim or thinking he did not deserve help, as two previous religious figures had done, but he didn’t – he showed mercy and cared for the man without any conditions. Elsewhere Jesus is even more explicit when he says “Judge not, so that you yourselves are not judged”. Throughout his life he showed acceptance to the most judged and vilified people of his time – prostitutes, lepers, disabled, tax collectors, adulterers, beggars and so on. He himself experienced judgement and unkindness much of his life; as a young child he and his parents were refugees, as an adult he was consistently misunderstood, rejected and threatened by his own people. His trial and death were unfair and brutal.

The point of Jesus’s teaching is not just that we should seek to be merciful and non-judgmental, but that in doing this we reflect the character of God. “Be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful” he said. God is not the big, bad villain we think but our compassionate, loving, merciful ever hopeful creator who only ever wants to restore and embrace us, most especially those who feel far away. God is the Father in the story of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan who binds our wounds, the employer who pays over the odds.

Learning to be accepting and non-judgemental seems to be intrinsic to the 12 Step programme too. Not only is there a recognition that we’re all in the same boat, all helpless addicts without a hope, but a deeply compassionate, merciful streak to all, even the difficult, awkward and contrary ones. The Big Book talks about having survived a common peril, regardless of who we are and having found a common solution. This is a solution where “there are no fees to pay, no axes to grind, no people to please, no lectures to be endured.” In the telling of stories and hearing different and common experiences there is a recognition that none of us is in a position to judge the other, because underneath it all we’re no different at all. We are all walking through this life with bandages and a limp.

Since in wider society we are conditioned to assess, categorise and judge almost all of the time (clothes, class, gender, age, job, weight, skin colour, income, ethnicity, religion, education level, etc) we have to work hard to overcome these prejudices. It seems to be like a little used muscle that only grows with practice, training and cultivation. As Anne Lamott says, “Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behaviour. We will never do this perfectly, but how do we do it better?” The Just For Today Card is a useful way of improving our behaviour by practising kindness, compassion and above all showing mercy. This is the mercy that I know I need from my fellow beings and above all from God for all my slips, errant behaviour and sometimes downright nastiness. I don’t deserve it and maybe others I meet don’t either, but mercy is never about just deserts. Encouraging those runners (and walkers) in the Great North Run is not about what they do or don’t deserve. It’s a gift, and when I saw the increase in pace, smile or look of gratitude on the faces of those I encouraged this year who would not in the past have made the cut, I realised that they were bandaged and in need of my support. And in that brief moment there was connection and the Kingdom of God became real to us both.

Mercy, mercy, looking for mercy. Peter Gabriel

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Jesus of Nazareth

Mercy is the stuff you give to people that don’t deserve it. Joyce Meyer

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved………The good news is that God has such low standards, and reaches out to those of us who are often not lovable and offers us a chance to come back in from the storm of drama and toxic thoughts. Anne Lamott

Most of us were taught that God would love us, if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. Richard Rohr

Compassion is not a virtue — it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have — it’s something we choose to practice. Brené Brown

G.O.D.

One of the few popular TV commercials in the UK at the moment, is a series of adverts for a large chain of opticians. People doing various jobs or activities get them woefully wrong without realising it, because they have poor, uncorrected vision. A shepherd shears his dog instead of the sheep, a vet checks the heart-beat of a fur hat instead of a cat, and so on. Specsavers catIf only they’d gone to the opticians! In a recent one, a joiner puts a back door on upside down, so that the cat-flap is at the top. The workman finishes the job and goes on his way, unaware of his mistake, whilst the mystified cat sits there gazing up at the unreachable cat-flap.

All too often in life we don’t see things very clearly and need a corrective. Jesus’s teaching and example was all about offering us this new focus and clarity. Consistently, he showed what a distorted picture we had, and still have about God. Whether it is the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, the farmer employing labourers, the hen protecting its chicks or the bridegroom and his guests, the stories Jesus told us about God are always correctives, giving us a picture of a God who offers acceptance, protection, care and inclusion. This is most perfectly captured in the story of the prodigal son, where the Father waits longingly for his lost son to return, rejoicing and celebrating when he does, offering forgiveness and reconciliation without a moment’s thought. The essence of that relationship – and all of the other parables Jesus told us about God, is one of unconditional love.

The corrective was needed – and continues to be required because we so often see God as very far from loving. We project onto God our own experiences of parents and those in authority, or our own attitudes and feelings towards ourselves. God becomes angry, punitive and vindictive, constantly disappointed in us, and we live our lives in fear, flight, anger and denial. In the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, the cunning serpent twisted Adam and Eve’s knowledge and understanding by depicting God as rule based, mean, controlling and prohibiting, a picture they completely buy into, abandoning in the process their real experience of God which was one of love and care. We do this today, and end up hiding or feeling angry, avoiding God in name, thought and conversation. A friend of mine who works in a twelve-step treatment centre once told me  that he could say almost anything to the new people entering the programme or use any swear word and it wouldn’t get the response that he gets when mentioning the word God. “ I can guarantee that it will offend someone in the room.”

For all that, there seems to be something very interesting at work amongst those who, with gritted teeth, stick with the twelve-step programme and somehow manage to deal with the God bit. Since it’s prescriptive rather than descriptive, believing in “a Power greater than ourselves” whatever or whoever that might be and “turning our lives over to this God of our own understanding,” is all that is required. Nobody has written about this better than Glenn Chestnut. He talked to a lot of old timers in AA, NA and other 12 step groups, who discovered a higher power of their own understanding in spite of the fact that many were atheists or bitterly opposed to organised religion. They learned to pray, developed strong spiritual lives, and had sustained recovery as a result.  More recently, Nadia Bolz-Weber says that she was helped in her early recovery by an elderly woman who told her that “this isn’t about religion, honey, you just have to find a higher power that you can do business with.” Having been brought up within a guilt-based church system, the real revelation to Nadia was that this woman’s relationship with God was functional, not doctrinal. The God she knew was the key to her staying sober.

Now it might be said that people are simply making God in their own image, but here’s the thing. What I find consistently true amongst all my friends and acquaintances in twelve-step recovery is that their higher power, the God of their understanding, is always kind, loving and accepting, though never in a cotton candy type of way. As one of them put it, “My higher power really likes me”. That is most definitely not the case for a good many mainstream Christians in churches today. God is the angry traffic cop just waiting to pull you over, the heartless judge, the disappointed probation officer, the vindictive jailer. The analogies with authority figures in our legal systems are no coincidence because so much of organised religion is about laws, rules, conformity and appeasing an angry God. I’ve seen it, heard it and if I’m honest, battled with these notions of God most of my life because that’s what I was brought up with. So if I’m given the choice between the higher power of the twelve-steppers which is benevolent and loving, wanting only the best for that person, or the harsh, angry God, constantly disappointed in me which lurks in mind – and I’m pretty sure a good many other people’s minds in churches or brought up in church, then I’ll take their God every time.

That’s why I cling on to the life and teachings of Jesus. Because in him everything comes together. He not only told us about the true nature of God, but in his life and death he showed it. And its really pretty simple. GOD IS LOVE. If that’s not always easy to hang on to or if it becomes tarnished by the love that we’ve received which is often very conditional indeed, then think on this. 1 Corinthians 13 is St Paul’s inspirational account of love. If we replace the word love with the word God, then our distorted picture is corrected, and finally we can begin to see more clearly, the true nature of God.

“God is patient, God is kind, God is not jealous, God is not boastful, God is not rude, God is not proud, God does not demand her own way, God keeps no record of being wronged, God does not rejoice at injustice, God rejoices when the truth wins out, God never gives up, God never loses faith, God is always hopeful, God endures through every circumstance.”

 If we all have different finger-prints, it is not so surprising that we should also have our own way of knowing and understanding God. We are all making the same journey, but the route is different for each and we have to discover it in freedom. Gerard W Hughes

 I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees. Anne Lamott

 Until you meet a benevolent God and a benevolent universe, until you realize that the foundation of all is love, you will not be at home in this world.  Richard Rohr

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.  St Augustine

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not. C.S. Lewis

 God is the father who watches and waits for his children, runs out to meet them, embraces them, pleads with them, begs and urges them to come home. Henri Nouwen

 

When Love Comes to Town

Sometimes just a few words that someone says to us can have a profound impact on our life.  A number of years ago, I met some incredible women who ran a centre in the USA which helped to transform the lives of women working on the streets. They offered them warm, safe houses to live in, help to deal with their addictions followed by education and employment opportunities when they had recovered. Many of the workers had been through the programme themselves. I got into conversation with one woman called Rochelle, intrigued by what made their programme so successful. I expected some well-established psychological approach within a structured programme, quietly hoping that it would accord with my own views about what did and didn’t work. I was in for a surprise. She just smiled and in her deep southern drawl told it to me straight. “Our approach is simple. We just luuurv them well”.

In another context, I might have dismissed this as well-meaning but hopelessly simplistic, but Rochelle and the others I met were extremely credible witnesses to the programme’s success, their own lives having been transformed through the power of love. Plus, she struck me as the sort of person not to pick an argument with! That brief conversation set me on a long process of reflection and conversations about love as a means of healing. There were many people I knew in the organisation where I worked who were employed in caring or therapeutic roles, running amazing projects, including one which also helped sex workers. With my newly opened eyes, I could see that love was undoubtedly at the heart of their practice – but they shied away from the word when I mentioned it. They understood that it meant agapé and not romantic love yet felt uncomfortable with the idea that they were loving the people they were helping. To them it seemed kind of wishy washy, unprofessional and unsophisticated – a long way from the confident and assured use of the word by Rochelle. As a description of what people do, Unconditional Positive Regard gets in under the professional radar, but not love!

Yet Rochelle and her friends were onto something. Researchers at St. George’s Hospital in London have found that oxytocin, a hormone naturally produced by the brain and often called the “love hormone” for its anti-anxiety effect, can help opiate addicts avoid relapse and remain clean. The hormone is most closely associated with childbirth and breastfeeding, but Oxytocin is also released through warmth, touch and affectionate connection. Other research has demonstrated the damage that lack of love does to a person’s wellbeing and healthy development as well as the positive effects of love on reducing stress, anxiety, depression and improving the immune system. Brené Brown who so often gets to the nub of what is going on in our damaged and broken lives and relationships puts it like this: “Love will never be certain, but after collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all men, women, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong.”

All of this presents a big challenge to me in how I live my life and do my work. Where does love figure in my actions, my intentions and my thoughts, wherever I might be and whatever I might be doing? As ever, I try (with a mixed degree of success) to make my reference point the life and teachings of Jesus. For him, love is at the heart of it all and pretty much everything he did and said was about love, because he came to show and reflect the love of God for all.  As Brennan Manning puts it so well, “Through meal-sharing, preaching, teaching and healing, Jesus acted out his understanding of God’s indiscriminate love  – a love that causes the sun to rise on bad people as well as good, and rain to fall on honest and dishonest people alike.” At times he can seem a bit snippy with his dim-witted disciples (or rather, the men, because the women consistently grasped what he was saying so much more quickly,) but he loved them all to the end – and beyond. He always believed in them, always thought the best, never kept a tally of their mistakes and always forgave them when they didn’t quite hit the mark. Jesus says that everything boils down to two things – loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves. And the God of love he pointed us to, leads the way every time.

The Big Book of AA says that “Love and tolerance of others is our code.” In his last major address to AA groups, Dr. Bob said he believed that the Twelve Steps, when reduced to their essence, could be summed up in the phrase “love and service.” Over the years I’ve heard it said that in Twelve Step meetings there’s a lot of talk about service, but nobody ever talks about love. If this really is the case, it may actually be okay, because talking about love is not love. Talk is cheap, but love can be costly because it is about doing something. Like riding a bike, love only works when you start pedalling. And truth be told, I see a lot of love in the rooms and amongst people in the fellowships – welcome, acceptance, long-suffering, understanding, giving, sacrifice and compassion. Wounded healers at work, dispensing love.

Love is

This blog site has covered some big themes so far, but none comes bigger than love. It truly is the golden thread woven into the whole tapestry of life. When all the ephemera is stripped away, our life work seems to be about learning to love. Learning to love God, learning to love our neighbour and learning to love ourselves. And because it’s what life’s journey is about, anything I say is only ever going to be a hazy impression of what love really is. Furthermore our understanding is always going to be changing and evolving.

But what I do know is this. Whether as the provider of a professional caring service or the recipient of one, someone with close family and friends who I want to love, or simply in the many casual encounters of the day, it is always possible to try to suffuse these relationships with love. We may not always get it right – in fact usually we don’t, but that should never stop us aspiring to the ideal of love.

So as it stands today, these are currently my top ten ways of trying to love people well, learned in the main from the way others have loved me:

  1. Welcome them at all times whether they are new to you or well-known and smile because it’s hard not to feel better when someone smiles at us. On occasions, a smile from a stranger has brightened my whole day.
  2. Allow them to be themselves – and accept them for who they are even if this is irritating and the tolerance isn’t reciprocated. It might seem that the world would be a better place if more people were like me, but its not true. It would be a nightmare.
  3. Don’t judge, label or categorise people and always think the best of them. This is very hard and especially difficult to avoid doing when discussing them or their actions later with other people. Gossip can be such a juicy morsel. But it’s not loving.
  4. Overlook small mistakes, errors or offences and don’t feel the need to mention these to them. Or indeed to anyone else.
  5. Be patient with them – on occasions this may involve counting to ten before speaking – or in my case counting to fifty or more.
  6. Look to their needs with acts of kindness. Think: what would I want others to do for me in this situation? They may or may not need to know we’ve done them a kindness, it depends on what it is. And the good news is that acts of kindness make us feel better too.
  7. Eat with them or at the very least have a tea or coffee with them. Somehow, eating together breaks down barriers. Jesus knew this and frequently did so with people who for whatever reason were hungry for inclusion and connection.
  8. Appreciate them for what they do and who they are – everything that makes them unique. Tell them they are valued and appreciated. Life is short and it’s too late to do it at their funerals.
  9. Pray for them and don’t feel the need to tell them that’s what we’re doing.
  10. Take time to love ourselves and connect with our core self. This may happen best in times of quiet, meditation and solitude when for a brief moment we stop listening to our chattering minds and receive the loving acceptance of who we really are, by a loving God of infinite compassion.

Love is, as Rochelle said, very simple. But it will take us a life-time to master it.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you do. C.S. Lewis

You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not. Jodi Picoult

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come. Henri Nouwen

Unconditional love does exist – it just has an 8 second shelf-life. Anne Lamott

When we love ourselves, we fill our lives with activities that put smiles on our faces. These are the things that make our hearts and our souls sing.  Elizabeth Kubler Ross

 Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Jesus Christ

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. Confucius

I was a sailor, I was lost at sea, I was under the waves before love rescued me. I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread, Now I stand accused of the things I’ve said. When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train, When love comes to town I’m gonna catch that flame, Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down, But I did what I did before love came to town.  U2