It's About Love
Spoiler alert: it's all about love. Really.
Have you had a holiday celebration that really touched your heart?
Last night the members of our choir as well as some of our significant others enjoyed the annual Christmas potluck in a church hall.
It was a wonderful time of connection and celebration of communal love.
At one point, the music director was standing there in front of us, holding the gifts and cards he had just received from the choir. The waves of love and tenderness were palpable and deeply moving.
It’s all about love.
We come together in choir because we love singing and as we do, over time, the love welling up in us who perform this labour of love grows stronger. For the One who makes this all possible, for the director, for each other, and for the wider community.
As there are fewer than two weeks in Advent, the Light, the Love that is being celebrated around the world feels ever nearer.
Hearts open wide to receive that love and it keeps overflowing to those around.
We don’t have to understand it. Maybe it cannot be understood.
But love is here, and there is no force in the world that can withstand it.
It is said that grief is love with no place to go. One reason this time is a very difficult one for many remembering a dear one who has been lost, recently or years ago. Love is all around and it intensifies the awareness of the loss.
So that, too, is about love.
There are many painful and difficult things to come to terms with as 2025 comes to a close. The wars between Russia and Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in too many other places in the world rage on despite ceasefires and peace attempts. The climate crisis grows more urgent to address while governments seem less willing than ever to make true commitments to change their planet-killing ways. Billions of humans are suffering from lack of food, clean water, safe homes, and other basic necessities while billionaires and the other ultra rich hoard and spend frivolously.
Where is love in all this?
The scandalous idea of the Author of the Universe somehow incarnating in a small baby in a makeshift cradle in a humble stable is mindblowing.
But this is love.
Not power over, reaching into the world with all its problems and strife and magically fixing things, taking away human agency.
Not even power with.
Coming to be with us, born, growing up, living, experiencing everything that this experiment called life is.
Dying, painfully, horribly, alone on a cross.
It’s about love.
The only response, then, to this incredible love is to love.
Love when it’s hard. When we disagree about important things, painfully. When there is a need to be met, when there is justice to support, when someone just needs that loving presence to help them get through another day and to know they are not alone.
It’s about love.