Love Looking for a Place to Go

By The Rev. Ted Thornton

​All three readings today remind us that if we want to call ourselves Christians, we cannot do so in isolation from one another, only together with one another, and, as the first letter of Peter reminds us, one with another even in the sufferings we endure in this life. 

In Acts 1 verse 11, as Jesus ascends into heaven we heard, two men 
(angels, maybe?), say, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’” This is as much to say, “Why are you staring vertically upward when what you should be doing instead is looking horizontally at one another? That’s where you’re going to be seeing Jesus from now on, not up there, but over there: in the face, in the eyes of the person next to you, that’s where you’ll see Jesus, not up in an endless blue sky.” 

That this is what Jesus intends for his followers is made clear in our reading from the Gospel of John. In chapter 17 verse 11, part of what is generally known as the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus, we heard Jesus pray “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world and I am coming to you, [God]. Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we - you and I, [God], are one.”

The period following Jesus’ ascension into heaven was a time of existential crisis in the lives of his followers. How will those early followers of Jesus, men and women, fill the void in their lives after Jesus has taken leave of them? What’s the key to turning their grief into joy and into the oneness Jesus prays for in John? Some of them, plunging wildly into denial, think this is the moment when the angel army in heaven will finally descend once and for all, to destroy political tyranny and hand the world back to God. 

But, after the foolishness of that expectation sinks in, denial stops working, and the pain of grief sets in. This is the point where genuine healing begins. It’s at this point, that the real grief work of the apostles begins.They do stop looking upward and begin to fix their gaze upon one another instead. They 
begin to permit Jesus’ priestly prayer to start working in their lives. It’s the beginning of agape, the beginning of the call to selfless, compassionate, self-sacrificing love for one another. It’s the birthing moment of the church. It’s now and only now that the apostles are ready to accept the gift of spirit, the gift of Pentecost. 

Recently, an expert in the field of grief counseling wrote, “Grief is a story of love looking for a place to go.”

‘Looking for a place to go after the loved one has left them behind. 

The place to go to find the “story of love” for those early followers of Jesus was with each other, and that togetherness, that community becomes the church. 

This community that we will eventually call the church is a community defined by the practice of agape (ἀγάπη): a place where our needs for contiguity and continuity one with another and with God are met, imperfectly for sure, but in my experience better than anywhere else in this world. The roots of the Greek word agape are obscure, but the central meaning of the word is connectedness to others including the practice of affection for others and the drive to protect and care for others. 

Perhaps more than anything else, what we human beings long for is connectedness: connectedness with others in the physical space that we 
call the world (that’s what I mean by “contiguity”) and connectedness with one another in time (that’s what I mean by continuity). When we lose contiguity and continuity with someone we love, we enter into one of the gravest crises a person can face. Healing happens when we find a place for our love to go. 

Psychologists call the sudden loss of a loved one “abandonment trauma,” and, as we know, it really hurts. It hurts a lot. And, those apostles were hurting a lot. 

Yes, it’s a physical and a psychological loss. But, it’s a religious and theological loss as well. The late theologian Huston Smith, used to say we all have those times in our lives when we catch the spiritual flu, those times when life just doesn’t feel very good, times when we realize we can’t live every moment of our lives “blissed out,” times such as this one - when looking up at the sky as Jesus ascends to heaven doesn’t work for the apostles. 

At first they probably sat around in a circle perhaps in that same upper room in Jerusalem staring at the empty space where Jesus blessed their last supper together, wondering if they would ever be happy again. We’re at the point where Jesus is gone and Pentecost hasn’t happened yet. It’s a time of the absence of spirit. It’s the spiritual flu. 

And yet we know that more is going on than apostolic grief-stricken sadness. The apostles pray, and they conduct business. They need a replacement for the traitor Judas Iscariot. We’re told later on in Acts 1 that this is the point where Peter steps in to lead apostolic business meetings, and at one of those first organizational meetings, Matthias is appointed as apostle number twelve. 

These important indicators of apostolic activity - the appointment of Matthias and the devotion to prayer - both begin with that gentle prod from the two men: “Apostles, why are you looking up into the sky?” How about less tearful looking up in the sky from now on, less sad, nostalgic hand wringing, and more looking at each other and getting down to business. It’s likely none of them recognized it yet, but - yes - this was the birthing moment of the church.
 
This is agape. And agape isn’t confined to what we do weekly within the walls of this beautiful church. It can happen anywhere anytime, and often when we aren’t expecting it. 

It happened to the English poet W. H. Auden when he was least expecting it, and in a part of his life when he did not consider himself very religious. 

As a young man, he was teaching at an English boarding school for boys. It was a custom in the early 1930s for the thirty or so senior boys nearing graduation to sleep out in the orchard under the stars. Sometimes there was a rain shower, but they pulled a tarpaulin over their heads and went to sleep again. 
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Auden decided he would join them, and with help, he dragged his iron bedstead with its mountain of blankets down the stairs into the garden of the Lodge, the bachelor masters’ house. 

Here he slept for several weeks, putting up an umbrella if it rained. Sometimes a group of geese came to share the shelter of its umbrella. 

He had never been happier. This set the stage for a life-changing experience one June evening. He published an account of it thirty years later, telling the story this way. 

“‘One fine summer night in June, 1933, I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us had a sexual interest in another. Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. 

“We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. I was also certain, though the conversation continued to be perfectly ordinary, that my three colleagues were having the same experience. (In the case of one of them, I was able to confirm this.) My personal feelings towards them were unchanged – they were still colleagues, not intimate friends – but I felt their existence as themselves was infinite and I rejoiced in it.”
 
“I recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me to deliberately injure another human being. I also knew that the power would, of course, be withdrawn sooner or later and that, when it did, my greeds and self-regard would return. The experience lasted at its full intensity for about two hours when we said good-night to each other and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning, it was still present, though weaker, and it did not vanish completely for two days or so. 

“The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do.” 

Auden did not immediately return to religion, the Anglican Church of his youth. But he did immediately seek an opportunity of putting into print his understanding of agape, the selfless love of one’s neighbor.
 
And, eventually Auden did return to the Anglican Communion. In 1940, he became a member of the Episcopal Church of St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York City where he remained until his death in 1973. 

Where in your life is your love trying to find a place to go? A family member with whom you’ve fallen out? A friend? Your church? Try sending your love even more to others and especially at those times when abandonment trauma claims you or your brothers and sisters in agape as a victim and you must then find a place for that loving grief to go. Amen 

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