Into the We

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. (John 15:9-10)

Dixie and I sometimes look at each other and speak a great truth, ‘We are we.’ We are not merely him and her together but something much more, a ‘We’ that is the love and history that binds us together, two as one, joined in a reality that is greater than the sum of individual parts, a unity in which there is rest and peace, forgiveness and mutual care.

It is to this unity of hearts that Jesus invites us. He beckons us through the ache in our hearts to join in a greater ‘We’ in which each of us basks in the river of love that flows from his heart into all the world. His longing is for us to know that his love is … for me—for each of us, personally—as if we were the only one in the world, the apple of his eye.

“If a [person] does not say in his [or her] heart, in the world there is only myself and God [that person] will not gain peace,’ so said Abba Alonius, one of the desert fathers of the early church.

We come to know peace and learn to love as Jesus loves only as we know ourselves as supremely and everlastingly loved, our identity founded on an eternal and unfailing love that knows the worst and weakness of who we are and delights in us still. For we each are a holy vessel, created to bear the Love who moves the sun and the stars.

The first commandment of Christ is not to love … but to know love, which is to know the One who is Love—and rest there a while. Abide, Jesus says. Let love have its way in your heart. It will awaken the beauty you are, light the lamp of joy in your eyes and fill you with gratitude for the gift of a full and free heart.

Just so, the first task of daily life is not to do but to rest in the place where Love finds you, the place where every last and lost corner of your heart fills with the joy of knowing, feeling and becoming the Love God is.

I don’t know where Love prefers to find and free you. Sitting on the front porch can be a good place. Back porches work, too, or conversation with a friend or your beloved. Music often moves me into Love’s embrace, so does being in nature.

But most basic of all is in sitting in silence and saying the words of the One who is Love’s own face. ‘Abide in my love,’ he says. Yes, abide, that we may be We.

David L. Miller