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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
