A Reflection and Poem for February 18, 2024 1st Sunday of Lent, Church of the Holy Trinity, Hertford Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Beloved
Today the Gospel lesson from Mark has Jesus coming out of the water of his baptism and hearing the words of God in his heart; “You are my Beloved”.
It is knowing he is beloved that he is able to face the wild beasts in the wilderness and to allow the angels to minister to him. The same is true of us, we are each of us beloved, and there are beasts of different kinds that threaten us in this world of so many wildernesses, and angels, seen and unseen that minister to us, maybe as close as a person in the next pew. Not all angels have wings to tip us off. Sometimes when our desire to keep things from changing we see angels as beasts who threaten our shallow, but comfortable, lives.
Today, let me continue my reflection with with something different. I stole this continuation from author and spiritual teacher, Henri Nouwen (1932–1996); one of my spiritual heroes, who I once had the pleasure of meeting. He invites us to our own prayerful experience as beloved by God. I ask you to relax and close your eyes and listen. If you go to sleep; that is alright; it means you are tired; God may want you to have sleep rather than words, but your brain is going to hear these words anyway and even then my hope is they will stay inside you until you need to be reminded that you are beloved;
We are the Beloved. We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us. That’s the truth of our lives. That’s the truth I want you to claim for yourself. That’s the truth spoken by the voice that says, “You are my Beloved” [see Mark 1:9–11].
Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my center words that say: “I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you at every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own as I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover and your spouse . . . yes, even your child . . . wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one.” Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World pp.30–31.
Thank you doing that exercise with me. I know it might have been hard because you have been taught all your life to keep your eyes open when someone is talking to you. Your parents would not have approved. I was in midlife before I understood that love was a gift, and it was not based on approval. I was under the mistaken impression that love threatened to be withdrawn if I did not meet approval. Love was something you earned: be it from God, or parents, or girlfriends, or spouse, or teachers, or friends, or neighbors, or clients, or students, or parishioners. Approval was something that I needed to earn on an hourly basis; the same way many other professions do it.
Then I met and, after I went through a period of disliking her, married Pat Wilson, and she worked hard to teach me that love is a gift freely given; it is not earned. She taught me daily that to be a beloved was not because, but sometimes, in spite of. Love goes with forgiveness, even before I asked. Pat died last year, but the resurrection tells us that love does not die, it just has changed the way we see it and appreciate it.
Joanna J Seibert is a deacon, physician, harpist, mother and grandmother in Arkansas who writes a daily reflection, "Daily Something" that I read every morning. Two of her friends, who were former Parishioners of mine told me about their friend, Joanna, I wrote to her and told her I was stealing part of what she wrote one day, for today's reflection here, as I was also stealing from Henri Nouwen. She laughed that her gift was given and therefore could not be stolen. She would pray for me and Pat. In a reflection about her grandfather of whom she wrote a book based on his years of letters of love and support to her as she was growing up and deeper; she wrote:
The God of my understanding does not give us a person we love deeply and suddenly allows that relationship to end with that person’s death. Ours is a God of love. The love from that companion we so profoundly cared about is still there with us. We are still in a relationship with that person, but in a way we do not understand. Their love does not stop. Our love for them does not stop. Death is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma.
My hope for each of you is that you know that you are surrounded by love and are Beloved, in spite of approval; and that you will love others in spite of them earning, or not, your approval. At the end of my life, I want my last thanksgiving to be the best: “I was able to love, and be, a Beloved.”
Beloved
It was a day that I met her and much disliked her,
that began our relationship. Disapproval flowing
to each other, and paradoxically was a growing
of an admiration of each other as a gift of myrrh.
The Wise Men gave that as a way of changing air
in space between people into a sense of presence
of something holy and deep into the present tense,
where something beautiful is there for us to share.
Yes, we were different, but as those French say,
“Vive la différence!” admiring the completing
of one's self instead of wasting time competing
against one another; but building into a new day.
Holy gifts are like that, hard for us to comprehend,
sometimes only understood when we reach an end.
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