Thanksgiving Week 3

 

Morning Meditation ~ Love

How is your list of ways you are encountering and experiencing God’s love going?  If you haven’t had time to reflect on God’s presence strangely warming your heart and whole life from yesterday, I encourage you to do that at some point, perhaps now.

It’s okay…I’ll wait.  Take your time.  Remember, you are savoring these sacred encounters like a piece of pie where each and every bite you might detect a different spice.  Keep asking yourself, “Tell me more!”  Let the curiosity of your life run rampant. 

These lists are a way of knowing, especially in the world today.  The point of the list isn’t that by the end you will have irrefutable proof of God’s existence.  The point is for you to know you better; the you that is still being crafted and created in God’s image each day.  There is a great line in the hymn, The Summons, “Will you love the you you hide if I but call your name?”  This is one way for us to live a response to that question.  

When we explore the mystery of ourselves with care and compassion, we can begin to expand and share that with others.  If we close ourselves off to the deepest part of our lives, if we choose to not know ourselves, we won’t have much compassion or care for others.  How we see ourselves is how we see others.  The words that stir when we stare in the mirror are carried within us out in the world as our lenses for making sense of what we encounter and experience. 

The power of love for self and other is that it is generative.  The more we ground ourselves in God’s love, the more it will guide us in how we encounter the other.  The more we let God’s love get a word in edgewise, the more we might come to know this as a reliable reality.  God’s love is inexhaustible, which challenges us in a world of sacristy.  We tend to think there is only so much toilet paper or hand sanitizer or vaccine or money to go around.  We can get caught up in clinging to what is ours.  The fear part of our brain says, “Get yours while the getting is good or you will only have yourself to blame.” 

To rewire our brains toward love is hard, holy work.

This is why such practices of making lists, detailed and defined lists, can help.  So may you and I go out with a Sherlock Holmes/Jessica Fletcher curiosity to investigate and discover what God is up to in the world today.  And may we be serendipitously surprised by the sacred in ways that make us laugh with joy and race to write down the description of the love.

Prayer: Love divine, all loves excelling, enter every trembling heart with a holy warmth we need today.  Amen.