Love. Love. Love.
On my way back from the conference in Nashville that I attended last week I made an overnight stop to visit my mother (my father died in 2001) in the little town in north Alabama where I went to high school. I put it that way rather than saying “my home town” because it was never my home; we lived some miles out in the country and the town was only where I went to school, and that for only three years. I was a pretty unhappy and alienated adolescent and I have never wished, as many apparently do, to return to that period of my life. I am filled with memories whenever I visit, and beset with waves of painful nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia for youth itself, for its expectations and desires, rather than for the time as I actually lived it. I would wish to change rather than to relive the past, and I’m glad that Satan doesn’t seem to have that possibility in his toolbox of temptations.
I always have an eye out for people I knew in high school, but I never see any. For many years it was young people I took note of, expecting my old classmates to look as they had twenty, then thirty, now more than forty years ago. I do remember now to expect grey or bald heads and wrinkled, sagging faces. But I’m not sure that the seventeen-year-old me would recognize the fifty-nine-year-old me, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve passed by people I knew without recognizing them.
I don’t expect to see anyone I know when I go to Mass at the little Catholic parish. If any of my classmates were Catholic I was not aware of it. This area has a very small Catholic population, much smaller than the Gulf Coast, where I now live, which was settled by the French and Spanish before the British arrived. The priest there now is Indian, and I like him. I sometimes have trouble understanding his speech, but to the extent that I can follow them his homilies are excellent.
Today he related an anecdote about St. John the Evangelist. It may be traditional, and I don’t necessarily think it actually happened, but it tells the truth. It describes St. John as a very old man being asked to tell the people about Jesus, from the time when John was his companion on earth. The people gathered around him expectantly, but John spoke only three words to them, or rather one word three times: “Love. Love. Love.”
A couple of weeks ago I read something that caused me a little distress. I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment or remember the author’s name, but she, an apparently respected spiritual advisor, described experiencing the Holy Spirit as an all-encompassing sensation of being loved, saying that anyone who experiences this never again feels unloved, and that furthermore—this was the distressing part—anyone who has not experienced it has not experienced the Holy Spirit.
Well, I’ve never had that experience—a taste or hint of it now and then, maybe, but nothing so strong and permanent as this writer describes. I take it on faith that God loves me, but I don’t experience it, or, to tell the truth, give it a lot of thought; I just hope he’ll be merciful to me. But I love him—one can’t really conceive of him properly and not love him—and surely that is of the Holy Spirit. The sense of belonging to, of being in, the Holy Spirit is for me an experience of giving rather than receiving love.
Oddly—or, perhaps, now that I think of it, fittingly—the first real experience of that sort occurred in this same little town, among those high school classmates where I never really felt that I fit in or belonged and where I was never at ease. It was after one of the big yearly dances, at an after-party gathering at someone’s house. We were about to have breakfast at 1AM or so, and someone, probably a parent, asked one of us to say grace. I remember the person who volunteered, or was appointed. He spoke briefly, and I don’t remember his words. But as he spoke I was suddenly possessed with an overwhelming feeling of love for everyone present. It was a great shock to me, and an embarrassment, and my immediate concern was not to give any indication of what I felt. It was certainly not something I had sought or deliberately worked myself into. I was an atheist at the time, and I can’t remember whether it occurred to me to connect the experience with God. But surely that was the Holy Spirit. And how I wish I had paid attention to it and followed it, instead of the spirit of darkness that I did follow for most of the next ten years.
It was almost exactly ten years later that I attended a class reunion—attended it against my better judgment, which was vindicated when I found myself feeling that I had been jerked back into a past that I was happy to have behind me. At the reunion, the person who had said the prayer that night refused to shake hands with me. I didn’t (and don’t) know why, but decided later that it was probably because I was a draft dodger and generally a bad character in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Perhaps that refusal was also a work of the Holy Spirit, although by then I had put most of the evil of the counter-culture behind me and was in the process of returning to God.
Well, one day the Holy Spirit will triumph, and all the alienation and the quarrels will be…I was about to say forgotten, but perhaps not—perhaps not forgotten but resolved, like dissonant chords in music. And by the grace of the Holy Spirit there’s no one that I don’t hope will be there.
Black snake highway—sheet metal ballet
It’s just so much snow on a summer day
Whatever happens, it’s not the end
We’ll meet again at the festival of friends.—Bruce Cockburn, “Festival of Friends”
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