April 1, 2010
Holy Thursday
Happy April Fool's Day!

1 John 4

I think my friends Linden and Clara and I pulled the nicest April Fool's Day joke ever - but it was only as we implemented it that we discussed the people who might be offended by it. This has nothing to do with the reading I'm looking at, but it took up my whole day, so I wanted to say something about it. There's a horrible mural in a classroom heavily used this semester by our program. It's bad - and in a really distracting way. Really low quality as well. So we made a higher quality one and hung it carefully over the old mural, so it can be removed easily without damaging the underlying in two weeks time.

I admit - it's a huge relief. And it's pretty. Very good for the soul. Ten thousand things to get accomplished in the next two weeks, already working on very little sleep, taking two days to do this was probably stupid, but it was very good for the soul.

The first part of this chapter is a counterpoint to my kick about not needing to call God by His proper name if He abides in your heart, but I think it's less of a rebuttal than at first glance. So although "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God," the thrust of this argument (and it seems to be talking about the people who know the truth but choose to walk away from it rather than just "anyone who doesn't know and listen and believe") seems better summarized a few lines later, "the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them."

And that's really everything I've been saying and figuring out this whole time right there (appropriately enough since Lent is now over and Triduum has come to bridge the gap between Lent and Easter). God and the Holy Spirit are in us and with us, and that means that the Kingdom of God is here, all around us, because heaven is where God is. And that is greater than anything the world has ever known - than anything the world can comprehend - than anything the world can offer - than anything we can understand while we walk along the earth - than anything we have ever known. Eye has not seen; ear has not heard.

And those who would lead us astray, who so often talk about our religion as if they do understand it, they make so much "sense" because it is just what they claim it is: "common sense." Common, worldly, "down-to-earth" sense that looks at something and draws the straightest line possible. Imagine a series of dots on a page, and someone telling you to connect them, promising that the picture will become clear someday, but the important thing is for you to reach out and make connections. Love. Now imagine someone came along and looked at the same dots on the page and saw not the infinite possibilities of interconnected lives, of a web of love and Body of Christ, but instead drew a line straight up the middle of them, from the "beginning" dot to the "end" dot that they so designated. And they called it common sense. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That's just common sense.

And that was an elaborate metaphor that I'm not entirely sure made any sense, but it sounded beautiful in my head, so I wanted to share it for a moment.

And all the beautiful pictures I try to weave around these words, these truths, in the hopes of making them clearer are really all just silliness - as is (what I hope is) the opposite of trying to make them dance before you and along a certain agenda (which I admit I sometimes worry I am doing). It's all silliness because the truth was always very simple:

"Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."

"We love because he first loved us. Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister who they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also."

"God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them."

So love.

I should really count, at the end of this, how many of these references I made, but at least one time more (and probably thousands):

They'll know we are Christians by our love. So will we. It is the very definition of being a Christian. Abiding in love. Abiding in God. They are the same statement, said two different ways because we (English speakers in particular) sometimes seem to love nothing more than coming up with multiple words for the same thing.

For such as I am all true lovers are. (That one's Shakespeare)

For such as Jesus was, all true Christians are.