Christmas greetings from the motherhouse of the Lindisfarne Community!
The daily lectionary for Christmas Day has a passage from the first letter of John. It is a passage about love, perhaps the most profound in all of Holy Scripture. This little discourse about love has these words, “If we love one another, God lives in us.”
Our Christmas celebration is of the coming of God in lowliness, in poverty, to lead us home. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, God living with us. John tells us what it means when God lives with us: it means that we love each other. I suppose this has been obvious to many, but it struck me with added import this Christmas morning. Anything without love is as nothing, “a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal,” as Paul says in that other passage about love.
This is striking, for so much of all I do is not marked by love, is not infused with God. It remains a deep longing to know God living, love present, in all I do. I hope, as a community, this may be our corporate desire: to be a community of love, to be where God lives.
Christmas blessings to all,
+Ab. Andy
The daily lectionary for Christmas Day has a passage from the first letter of John. It is a passage about love, perhaps the most profound in all of Holy Scripture. This little discourse about love has these words, “If we love one another, God lives in us.”
Our Christmas celebration is of the coming of God in lowliness, in poverty, to lead us home. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, God living with us. John tells us what it means when God lives with us: it means that we love each other. I suppose this has been obvious to many, but it struck me with added import this Christmas morning. Anything without love is as nothing, “a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal,” as Paul says in that other passage about love.
This is striking, for so much of all I do is not marked by love, is not infused with God. It remains a deep longing to know God living, love present, in all I do. I hope, as a community, this may be our corporate desire: to be a community of love, to be where God lives.
Christmas blessings to all,
+Ab. Andy