Naked before God

In Publix yesterday there was a table which had large heart-shaped cookies and lots of icing bottles. The idea was clear, that children would be able to decorate a cookie for their mothers for Mother’s Day. My daughter quickly explained that this was no help to her because I was with her and then added, a few minutes later, well you would not have been able to eat the cookie anyway.

Commercially, in our stores, love looks like red and pink hearts, flowers, candy, cakes and those never ending jewelry trying to persuade is to buy a necklace or ring. It is interesting, of course, that we use a heart shape. The heart is the center of our human body in the sense that it pumps life around us. No heartbeat, no life.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus commands us to love. It is a passage with which many of us are familiar but what does this love look like. It is commanded and the commandment is an expansion of the 10 commandments. Jesus states it in a shorter form elsewhere – Love the Lord you God with all your heart, says Jesus, and love your neighbor as yourself.

God is love, the Bible tells us this. Our ability to love links our humanity to God’s divinity. Loving and being loved makes us more human, and God always loves us. Loving others brings us into community and this is the second part of Jesus’ command, to bear fruit that will last. Love, as a habit, transforms a soul from here and forever.

But it is a  constant practice, something which we have to learn and that learning is through prayer, spending time in the presence of God, in the presence of Love.

Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century mystic and anchoress talks in Chapter 5 of her book Revelations of Divine Love about coming into God’s presence and there are three words she uses which I would lie to explore with you. She says,

Our good Lord revealed that it is very greatly pleasing to him that a simple soul should comennaked, openly and familiarly.

Naked, open and familiarly.

My guess is most of us are not particularly comfortable naked. We do not like what we see in the mirror. Julian, of course, is not trying to start some movement of abandoning clothes but rather is asking us to look at ourselves kindly and without all the ornamentation with which we so often surround our bodies. Who are we at root, in what is a personhood based. Most of us are very careful with clothes. The clothes we wear portray and image of ourselves, they express our values in all sorts of subtle ways. Clothes are coded in different cultures to mean different things. But what happens when we strip away all that coding and all the other stuff with which we surround ourselves – can we come before God as who we are, as a child of God and learn the confidence of being really and truly loved.

This idea reminded me of the times each of my children learned to undress themselves and they would appear, without clothes, and delighted with their achievements. Some of them did this many times, deciding that no clothes, or just underwear was preferable to being dressed. But here’s the thing, a small child finds no embarrassment in this, they simply delight in who they are and the achievement of learning a new thing.

Julian’s second word is open. Openness overlaps with the previous point but is adds something as well and that is the willingness to learn and change. As we grow, as we fall more and more in love with God, we are challenged and invited to pray and live in more and more mature ways. It comes as a surprise to many people to find that they hit a point in life when the spiritual practices and ways of praying which they have been engaged in for years, no longer seem to work. It is no surprise to us that our children and grandchildren read different books, watch different movies and listen to different music from older generations – yet often we think that our approach to God, our talking with God, our path to God is set throughout our lives with no variance. And then our fear is that things are broken.

Openness means that we accept that our faith journey is a process. We accept that sometimes we will feel close to God and sometimes we will go through periods of doubt and darkness. Openness means that we are willing to grow and change over the years – that we try new things before the old ones wear out on us. Being in love with God is not simply a repetitive process which we go through because we should, that is very sad, it is something dynamic and life giving.

Julian’s last word is familiarly – we come to God with familiarity, as someone we know and who knows us. Familiarity is something which some of us might find a hard concept. After all God is high and holy, God is different from us and perfect and exalted. All of this is true, but the reality of the Incarnation, the reality of Jesus is that God is made familiar. This God of Trinity is both other and the same and love is the key which connects all.

When we come to God we are entering our home territory. This is not the same as watering God down to an over-familiar “my mate Jesus” God. Jesus did call his disciples friends but in this same passage he commands them. This is not a suddenly passive God going towards the cross but rather a God who provides a way which can be known and explored by all – a path of love. This path of love builds us up and makes us more who we can be but it is not easy, it is not like those things which we can buy in the store which get used up and thrown away. When God says “I love you” it is a permanent and life changing statement.

Love is a hard thing. If I am who I truly am and you are who you truly are and if we are loved by God just as much as everyone else on this planet, then there are some tough questions to be answered in terms of the way our works behaves and who has, and has not got, what.

There are questions to be asked about children who grow up without hope, around the world. Children who will never learn self-honesty because they have never been allowed to develop into their God-given identity. There are questions to be asked about those children who are literally naked or wear our left-overs, who do not have access to food, education of medicine. There are questions about children who grow up surrounded by hatred, who witness atrocities. Love does not look lightly at this problem, does not turn away because it is too painful. Love asks questions and seeks real and long-lasting, life changing answers.

But we are endowed with a real capacity to make change. We are given tools with which to transform our own lives and tell that story to others, to invite them in to community. Today we celebrate mothers, but the invitation to love, to nurture and to return to other people through thick and thin is one which is made to every living person. The gifts which we give to each other on days like today are real and important demonstrations of the love which we hold and share. But the most important demonstration of love is our own lives, transformed and shaped by the love of God and our love of each other. “ Love one another as I have loved you,” says Jesus. And so we must.