Washed in the waves

 Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:1-3)

I liked hearing the preacher last Sunday. I’d not been to church in four months or so and for the most part had not missed it. Worship had grown stale. Sunday morning had become a desolation of the heart, drowning love and joy in the stagnant waters of formalistic routine.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the church’s historic liturgy, music and rituals that invite reverence, praise and gratitude for graces given. They connect us with the people of God from ages past, not to mention the God who is our help and hope in every age.

This was exactly what I was not finding, no matter how much I threw myself into the hymns, prayed along with the intercessions and opened my heart to the homily. Sunday to Sunday, I left the sanctuary less alive and able to love than when I entered.

I blame no one. My experience is just that. Mine. Others may have left the same service feeling the fresh wind of the Spirit blowing through their hearts. Not me. I spent despondent Sunday afternoons, wanting the tears and joy that come so freely when I sit in my morning chair and open my Bible to savor the image of Jesus, feeling the tenor of his voice awaken Love’s presence in my heart.

Last week, my prolonged absence from the gathered people of Jesus became too heavy to bear. I searched for a place I could be an anonymous face in the crowd, unknown except to the Love who was calling me home. I longed for a place I could be just one more face at Jesus’ table, one more pair of empty hands eager to receive his food and drink, one more voice confessing its sins, one more heart hoping to leave the sanctuary lighter and more alive for having been there.

I searched church websites for a place to go, but my Saturday evening scrolling turned up nothing promising. Sunday morning, I arbitrarily decided to drop in at a place Dixie and I regularly pass as we run errands. It was the church shopping equivalent of opening the Bible and blindly pointing at a page, hoping to find a word to address whatever distress you are feeling at the moment.

Sometimes it works.

Happiness met me at the door as a group of children, white, black and brown, spring carnations in hand, prepared to process into the sanctuary as the music of Handel floated through the door. I took my place, sitting as far from the front and as out of the way as possible. A priest of indiscernible ethnicity, at least to me, entered and addressed us as I pawed through the hymnal.

I missed much of what he said. His staccato jumbled into a tangled mass as I struggled with an unfamiliar accent. But as the liturgy went on, it didn’t matter. I understood everything I needed to hear and I suspect everything he wanted us to understand, as he smiled and turned smoothly from one element to the next.

Undulating waves of affection flowed back and forth across the room, rising and falling and returning again and again, like breakers on the shore, each wave washing over the gathered souls, dissolving the boundaries between us. Awash in a single sea, we rose and fell with each surge and swell, joined in the love flowing from the leader’s joy across the room and back again in rhythmic sway.

No one was excluded, not the youngest children nor the most elderly. We were caught up together, gathered as one, praying the prayers, singing the songs and listening to the plain words and unadorned sentences of a simple message inviting us to trust the Love who wants us, the Love who promises to come to us and for us wherever we are, even when we die.

I dropped into church hoping to find something for myself, only to be caught up in this sea of love, one with everyone else in the room. Sometimes I think of God as an all-embracing field of energy, the energy of love, everywhere active, drawing us and everything else into one great love, one harmonious wholeness. This is what I felt in that room on a Sunday morning, for which I thank God—the priest, the musician and most certainly the carnation-bearing children who brought tears to my eyes.

It occurs to me that my Sunday morning experience is not just a moment but a revelation, an incarnation of what all of reality is. We live and move and have our being in this great field of Love who struggles against all odds and our worst instincts to pull us toward each other—or at the very least to hold us and every whirling thing from flying off in every direction.

It’s a complicated thought, and I think there is some truth in it. But it all starts with the clear, simple words I leaned in to hear as Love’s waves washed over us. Don’t worry, the words said. I want you. I’ve got you. I will bring you to where I am. I want you with me, no matter what.

David L. Miller