Jack Hardaway
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We are always leaving.
Someone is always leaving. Something is always ending.
Seasons of life slip away, sometimes quietly and slowly, sometimes suddenly.
The next thing we know everything changes. I thought I saw it coming, but I didn’t.
Sometimes we get to say good bye, sometimes we are just up and gone.
We live in a world full of leaving.
Sometimes it is a grief.
Sometimes it is a mercy.
Sometimes it is way past time.
Sometimes it is release, song and dance, exodus, the road to freedom.
Jesus dwells on this.
His own leaving. Leaving town as he wanders and teaches and heals. Leaving the land of the living in His death. Leaving his friends in his Ascension.
Leaving is what Jesus does. But he always comes back. I am leaving you. I am with you always.
Grief and longing for Jesus is for many a consuming experience in their faith.
If you study the saints, there is often this experience of God withdrawing, becoming distant, a time of spiritual dryness.
Arid like the dessert of Sinai, or the wilderness of Judea. Mother Teressa of Calcutta had that experience. It lasted most of her life.
God is up and gone. That is how faith is often experienced.
And all we are left with is each other.
And our love for each other.
And in that love God is reborn into the world.
The Spirit, the breath of God, enters the world once more in our love for one another.
It is a miracle even greater than the incarnation and the resurrection, that God lives on in the world through us, through our love.
For the Gospel according to John, this Spirit born presence of God, incarnate in our lives, is the whole point of the story.
Love feels grief and longing, distance and dryness, song and dance, release and freedom all at once, all the time. It is the breath of God living in us.
We feel as God feels, as much as we can bear, sometimes more, we feel the piercing wounds, and the closeness, the communion, the oneness. It is always fleeting, a gossamer thread that slips away, leaving eyes brimming with the tears of joy and the sigh of loss.
God is always too close and too far. Leaving and arriving.
The Good News, the miracle, is that God’s love is pouring into the world in a mighty torrent, and the crazy thing is that we are that water and blood baptizing the world.
Ubi Caritas Et Amor, Deus ibi est, it is one of the ancient songs of faith. Where charity and love are, God is there. We live in a world full of leaving. We also live in a world full of love, the fullness of God.
Jesus is that love.
To love Jesus is to live in love.
To live in love is to love Jesus.
That is belief.
That is the commandment.
That is life, and breath and salvation.