Each week during our fall pledge campaign [Sep 30-Nov 18] I reflect on a different aspect of love, guided by Scripture and quotations from literature or from prominent figures in history.

In recent weeks I’ve written here about love of self and love of neighbor. Next up in the queue were love of Creation and love of God. Love of God is perhaps the most ineffable—the hardest to define or pin down; too wonderful and beyond our knowing to adequately express. I can’t tell you how one goes about loving God except to say this: we love God because God has first loved us, and so I suppose if we wish to love God we simply ask for the eyes, ears, and heart to recognize when God is extending the divine self to us. Once we are able to recognize, love is a response so natural that it rises in us and flows from us without any further prompting or effort from us.

How exactly does God extend the divine self to us? In a myriad of ways, using whoever and whatever God decides will best reach us in the moment, I suppose. I offer you an experience in which I encountered the divine presence lately.

On Friday and Saturday, I gathered at the cathedral in Denver with nearly five hundred other Episcopalians to elect our next bishop. Bishops are elected by ballot and a particular percentage of those gathered (in both lay and clergy orders) is required in order for a candidate to be elected. It is not unusual for there to be multiple ballots before an election is declared. While ballots are being counted, there is music, prayer, and meditation. If nothing else, it keeps us unruly souls in our seats and focused on the holy work at hand. That work can take some hours!

While the first ballot was being counted on Saturday, the cathedral organ sounded a low rumbling drone. I thought a large truck was passing by on the street. But then above the drone, their voices standing upon it, the choir sang Veni Sancte Spiritus (“Come, Holy Spirit”) the ancient hymn calling upon the Holy Spirit. The three Latin words were chanted over and over and over again. The congregation picked them up and sang softly, and then laid them down. The choir continued. It was easy to get dreamily lost in the music, which was sort of the point.

I meditated by gazing at the figures of Christ in the stained glass window over the cathedral’s high altar. They formed a kind of icon. Icon gazing is actually a widely practiced form of prayer: “The word 'icon' simply means image. Icons are soul windows, entrances into the presence of the Holy. Icons serve as invitations to keep eyes open while one prays. It is prayer to just look attentively at an icon and let God speak. The profound beauty of an icon is gentle. It does not force its way. It asks for time spent before it in stillness….gazing. More importantly, it invites the one praying to be gazed upon by it. One is invited to enter into the icon and come closer to the Holy One portrayed.” [1]

There are seven tall arched-top windows at the front of the cathedral. In the center of the seven is the window centered above the altar. In it, Christ appears to be depicted in three seasons or aspects of his life, and curiously in each of the three depictions, he is a different size!

In the bottom-most depiction, Jesus is large, standing atop an orb that could be the earth. One arm is outstretched and one folded across his chest. It is an inviting posture. Above this, the second or middle depiction is of Jesus on the cross. His arms are so bowed upward that it is clear he is dead—his body has slumped, the weight of it cutting off the oxygen to his lungs. The figure of Jesus in the middle depiction is by far the smallest of the three, so much so that it almost looks like it belongs to a window of different scale.

The top-most depiction is Christ ascending, and this figure is by far the biggest of the three. His arms are crossed over his chest. I stumbled across a comment that ancient Egyptian kings were buried in this fashion, their crossed arms a mark of their kingship. [2] Whatever the true significance, Christ’s arms are thus and he is wearing a blue robe surrounded by a deep blood-red flowing cape. These garments arranged about him create a mandorla—the almond shape created the overlap of two circles. Above the head of this top-most figure in the window is another orb, this one looking more like a crown than the one far below.

As I gazed, several thoughts arose:

+ That the resurrected Christ is the largest of the three depictions is no accident. It’s as if the artist was looking at the window from bottom to top and saying, “Mortal life is good…Death? Meh, not worth using up much real estate in this window…Eternal life, the resurrected life? Ah, now it is the largest and most glorious of all!”

+ The resurrected Christ as a mandorla connotes Christ as the overlap/intersection/bridge/connection between earth and heaven. This is congruent with Scripture that describes him as the great high priest, the one who eternally mediates between humanity and God.

+ The flowing blood-red cape surrounding the resurrected Christ looks exactly like a deep laceration, a painful flesh wound. There—ta-da!!!—in the center of that pain and wounded-ness is the living Christ. Perhaps his presence is most readily discerned in the midst of human suffering and pain, where he can be found bearing it in glory.

+ The head of the top-most figure is crowned by one of those saint circles—the glowing aura emanating from the top and sides of the head that looks like a holy bonnet. The saint circle was punctuated by three red rays that gave the appearance of Christ wearing the Styrofoam life-ring from a ship on his head. Silly as that sounds, it syncs theologically: Christ as a sort of life-ring for the world.

As I gazed unblinking and the choir sang, a kind of heartbeat pulsed through the air in the cathedral. As I gazed unblinking, the air in front of the windows began to shimmer and grew dark—except for the centermost window, which glowed. As I gazed unblinking, the topmost figure in the window moved forward slightly, and then to my amazement, the seven windows began to sway gently from side to side, pulsing with the heartbeat of the chant.

This divine phenomenon lasted only a few moments, which was good. Any more might have been unbearably lovely. When it finished I was left with a solid, grounded sense of Emmanuel—of God with us, dancing in that space and time, and in the work, we were doing together.

It is impossible for me not to love God-given experiences like these.

I can’t tell you how one goes about loving God except to say this: we love God because God has first loved us, and so I suppose if we wish to love God we simply ask for the eyes, ears, and heart to recognize when God is extending the divine self to us. Once we are able to recognize, love is a response so natural that it rises in us and flows from us without any further prompting or effort from us.

[1] http://writingicons.weebly.com/praying-with-icons.html

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Pharaohs-cross-their-arms