A Perspective on Love

A Perspective on Love

6 Easter, May 17, 2020

The Rev. Nancy E. Gossling

In our family room, on our coffee table, there is a pottery bowl created long ago by our son Brian. In it, I’ve placed some polished stones given to me by a Native American friend many years ago. In these recent days, my granddaughter, Elia, loves to run her fingers through the stones, as if she’s playing with water. She also likes to spread the stones out on the table and then put them back into the bowl. On each polished stone, there are two words, one on either side. On one stone there are the words “perspective” and “love.” The word love has little “plus” signs all around it.

+Love+ Right! Love is a plus sign, a benefit to all who receive it and to all who share it. It also has its costs. Love is fluid, like water that runs through our fingers, like God’s Word that comes from heaven and returns back again, like stock market volatility, like COVID 19. Love demands perspectives on life and death, a cost/benefit analysis, and the ways we live and move and have our beings.

A priest who was trying to communicate the division in his church over sexuality explained it this way. When our perspectives vary it may seem as if we are talking past each other. We feel as if the “other” has a deaf ear, a stone-cold heart, and an inability to let go of preconceived notions. We talk from the perspective of science and biology. We engage in conversations about free-wills and different choices. We drop the God word, as if human relationships were all about, indeed only about, sex. Then we pull out our mental health bibles, or our hospital guidelines, and point to what is considered sick. Hopefully, eventually, we talk about love as a configuration of relationships. Maybe we even remember Jesus, that Jesus gave us God’s Love. It was a cost to him; a benefit for us.

The pandemic conversation echoes these memories for me. Dr. Fauci claims that he speaks from the perspective of a scientist, a physician, and a public health official. Meanwhile, the President and local business owners are worried about the economy, and remind us how death comes in many ways. People suffering from inequalities, long-established in our systems, decry the higher risk of infection, poverty, and injustice. It’s an old perspective coming into sharper focus for us today. As systems and buildings and ways of “living and moving and having our beings” crumble all around us, like ancient ruins in Greece, our faith rises with hope. We all clap our hands for +love+.

Some people claim to know God; while others search desperately for God. St. Paul gave the Athenians a new perspective. Your “unknown” God is not far away, untouchable, or unknowable, or found in material things. God’s +Love+ has little “plus signs” all around it. Even as it tears down the walls of division, hatred, prejudice, fear, and death it will build us up in new ways of living, and loving, and moving our beings. In fact, +Love+ is in the air. Receive it, and then give it away. It may cost you something but the benefits are heavenly.

Acts 17: 22-28

“Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’