The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Religious Life Sunday
Psalm 27:1, 5-13 (BCP)
Episcopal Student Center, Austin, Tex.

When I was a boy, I loved love. The bookish beauty and the beastly prince, the curse lifted at last and sealed with a kiss: a true love truly returned. They lived happily ever after. I twirled with delight that this should be! Love was strong, love was true, love was beautiful, love was waiting for me. Someday I’d find my learnèd damsel (or later, it seemed, a handsome prince) and all would be solved: I’d be known, I’d be held, I’d be free. Happy then and happy ever after. The world has a way of sorting you out, of course, of telling you how it is, where you belong, who you are (whether what the world tells you has anything to do with reality is beside the point). For better and for worse we outgrow fairy tales, and if we’re lucky someday we grow back into them. We can let their tender vines wrap around the harsh corners of our lives and into the jagged places of the heart. But that in-between season can be awful and awfully long.

When I was a boy we sang songs about a man named God (in those days God was always a man). We were his and he was ours, whose banner over us was love. He invited us to his banqueting table, he was the vine and we were the branches. Songs can be like fairy tales, I think. They tell you something true and get deep, deep within, like a stream cutting a course through stone: wending, weaving, warping the atlas of the heart. Maybe that’s why I never really let go of the idea: Love was strong, love was true, love was beautiful, love was waiting for me.

When I was 26 I got on a train, the 8:05 to Boston. I walked through Harvard Square down to the river to a place where some men had built a chapel and prayed that they may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of their life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to seek him in his temple and kept on praying that for 150 years. Years later I would find a house of women in the hills of Tennessee–Mary Zita, Mary Madeleine, Elizabeth, and Hannah (and Penny the dog and Sophia the cat too)–who had been set high upon the rock to sing and make music to the Lord and the most wonderful biscuits after church each Sunday. They called each other sister, the Bostonians called each other brother, and they sought neither damsels nor princes. There in the silence of the monastery and the splendor of the hills I began to wonder what kind of love this must be. Was it strong? Was it true? Was it beautiful? Was it waiting for me?

Love came down from heaven all those years ago, strong and true and beautiful, and walked around a place I’ve heard about called Galilee. Love called out to ordinary people doing ordinary work, ordinary people like you and like me. Love asked if they trusted Love enough to do something about it, to let themselves be changed, and Love has been asking ever since. I met a man who had been a priest for 20 years and asked him if he thought it worth his time. “It takes a lot to do anything for 20 years,” he mused. “But it takes love most of all, to let yourself be loved by Love Itself and to learn to love well in return.”

Love is a grand idea, the best we’ve ever had, spinning out and on, filling the universe time out of memory, when God spoke in our hearts and asked if we would seek Love’s face. But seeking and finding is a full-time job, which I suppose is why we have monks and nuns and priests. You don’t have to be one of these: anyone can try. Anyone can ask, anyone can seek, anyone can find. Soon enough you find yourself seeking God’s face while you do the dishes and sing songs and share stories and laugh at the dog and cry, for sorrow and for shame and for beauty best of all. You find yourself seeking God’s face in a bit of bread as the wine slakes down your throat. You find yourself tending the scrapes and bickering about how to plan the garden and holding each other close when nothing makes sense. Sometimes you fight God in the middle of the night and ask how you got here in the first place and whether any of it was ever real. Love is more than damsels and princes, it seems. It’s more than beautiful chapels and quiet hills. Ask any of the monks or nuns or priests; they’ll be happy to tell you. Love is the very stuff of life: ordinary, boring, and mundane; elusive, transcendent, and mysterious; and without love, none of the rest is worthwhile at all.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty so old and so new,” cried the saint. “late have I loved you! And look! You were within me, and I was outside myself: and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created: you were with me, but I was not with you. Those created things kept me far away from you: yet if they had not been in you, they would have not been at all.”*

We give ourselves to what we think matters, to the truths we think are worth building a life upon, which is another way of saying we give ourselves up for the sake of what we love, at least as best we can. We find the people whose deepness calls to our own, the places where we can put down roots, the things that help us make a home. Where these things are, love is, and where love is, God is. This very deepness in which all other deepness abides, this soil that feeds our roots, this one true home to which we are all called, this love in which all other loves find their meaning: this Love is strong, this Love is true, this Love is beautiful, and it is waiting for you. So love God, and love the people God brings to you. Love them as best you can for as long as you can, which in God’s time means you can love them forever, even when they walk the path we cannot yet follow but someday must.

When I was a boy, I loved love. Now I am older and hopefully wiser. I still love Love and I pray that God will keep me in the house of this Love forever. For now, I see in part and know in part, but one day I shall understand completely and see God’s face which I have sought for so long: strong and true and beautiful, waiting for me and for you.

Thanks be to God.

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*Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, tr. Carolyn J. B. Hammond