Spiritual autobiography: Summary 2

Love has to be key and foundation to any attempt at understanding Christianity or the message is completely lost. That is what I extrapolated from my time with the Jesus People, Mom, the Dutch Lady, in St. Margaret's, the Live-In retreats, then it all got kind of lost for a while with the radical Mennonites, Dayspring, and resurfaced again briefly at the Foursquare Pentecostal church till they got a new pastor, then got horribly misplaced at St. James and in much of my explorations of the Anglican Church, nor was it to be found with the fundamentalists. In the gay church Christian love was often conflated and confused with sex and romance (same gender, of course!) and it didn't really turn up again nor has it really, since my return to the Anglicans. This isn't to say that none of those people were what I would call loving, but it just has not really been practiced or lived in any of these churches at the intensity or the lived reality that I experienced elsewhere. But love, nonetheless, is my cornerstone, my keystone and my lodestone, for that is the reality on which this whole universe is hinged. And this has become the operating principal of my life. Love was incarnated as Jesus, for God is love, and love bore all of our misery, despair, loneliness, terror and sin on the cross and love died their for us only to be raised again from death and the grave because love the all-conquering can never be conquered. In the mass at St. James, I was daily reminded of this supreme work of love and was challenged each day to live out this love in my interactions with my clients and friends, many sick, lonely and dying. This same love taught me about social justice and the importance of speaking truth to power because without love, neither have we truth. And this all hangs on this persistent and stubborn universal and eternal reality: that God is love, and regardless of what we believe or of what religion we prefer, we are all being drawn by his love into that ultimate and eternal feast where we can live out eternity basking in his presence, the presence of universal love, personified in Christ. Here I will not go into that wasted exercise of comparative religion because for me it is not a matter of whether or not Christianity is superior or of whether all faiths are equal. That is for God to decide. But it is for us to be open to the call of love to draw us out of our limited and broken selves into something better and higher and for this cause Jesus died and lives again and now he can live in us. This is what I believe and this is how in my faltering steps, I have sought to live.