The Loving Light of God

Beloved in Christ,

This week, I read Frederick Bauerschmidt’s book The Love That Is God. It’s a wonderfully refreshing primer on what Christians believe, and what we mean when we say “God is love.”

In a section on prayer, he refers to St. Therese of Lisieux’s idea that prayer is a way of dilating the soul.  Far more than simply asking God for things, true prayer is about sitting next to God, whose love is the ground and source of all creation, allowing God to hold our longings, our heartache, our gratitude, and those of the whole world. This has the effect of expanding us, dilating our souls, opening us more and more to sit with our pain and the pain of the world in compassion and love. 

I know that all of us are anxious in these weeks leading up to the election. The stakes are high. Vulnerable people are the targets of hateful rhetoric. Our desire to defend, to win, and to be right brings a tightening and rigidity to our bodies, our minds, and our actions. What the way of love always calls us to is a softening of our hearts, an opening, a holy dilation that allows us to more fully and freely participate in God’s project of healing our bitterly broken world with love, and that makes breathing room for the fruits of joy, peace, and compassion to grow in us and through us. 

In the remaining thirteen days until the election, I am asking every one of you to pray each and every day for our nation, holding the bitterness, the fear, and the scorn in and around each of us before the loving light of God. No matter the outcome, the months and years to come will continue to demand we witness to peace, we work for justice, we stand on the side of those who are oppressed. But we will do so most faithfully, not when we are tightly wound with fear and anger, but when our hearts and souls are being expanded, softened, opened more fully to God’s gentle and demanding, tough and tender, world-saving way of love. We can only know that love through daily prayer, holding onto Jesus, who is its sign and sum, and who, through the rise and fall of all our empires, is alone the Lord of all creation. 

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya