Interrupted By Love

How important is love in your life? I mean as a basic, foundational dynamic in your relationship with your family, with your friends, with your primary connections to the world in which you live and work each day of your life – how important is love as a primary claim on your life? Is it very, very, very important? Is it essential, vital, first among all values in your life?

Or is love, for you, let’s be honest here, merely “sort of important,” something you pay some attention to maintaining, but not really the driving, dominant number one force of your existence; something you need a certain amount of to keep equilibrium in your life, sure, but only up to a point?

Or are you one of those rugged individual types who gets slightly nauseous whenever some bluebird starts singing, ‘Love Is All You Need.” Do you really believe that love is a much over-rated romanticism, a somewhat sappy sentimentalism; nice when it visits your life, but pretty far down, in fact, on this list of life’s primary needs?

I’m willing to guess that if we posted a poll-taker at the front door of every house of worship in the land this weekend, and asked every one coming in this one simple question, “How important is Love in your life?” at least 99% of folks going to worship this week would answer without hesitation, “Oh, love is without doubt the most important thing in my life. Why, it’s primary, vital, irreplaceable. It’s what makes the world go round, of course!”

That is, I think, what most people of faith would say. It’s a skewed cross-section, I know, but I’m sure most folks claim to believe in the primacy of life, in the central life love occupies in our lives. And yet – maybe it’s because we’re all very busy or because we get distracted a lot – but if you’re like me, there are more than a few days when this ‘primary value” of your life doesn’t get primary attention at all. Indeed there are days when the demands of love can feel more like an interruption of my life than like the foundation of it all.

I was reminded of this hearing a friend of mine share a story not long ago. With her permission, I pass it along to you because I think a lot of us will relate to it.

She was trying to get some work done at home one day (she is a writer and she was working under deadline) and her eight-year-old daughter kept coming to her with little problems and questions, the way children sometimes do. “I was feeling frustrated trying to concentrate and get this task of mine done,” she said, “and my daughter genuinely just didn’t seem to understand that she was interrupting. And it occurred to me the third or fourth time that it happened, that my daughter did not see what she was doing as an “interruption” at all. In her eyes our relationship, hers and mine, is our life. And it is the work that interrupts us, not the other way around. We get busy with our work and our pre-occupations of one kind or another, and we forget the proper order of things sometimes.

Yes, someday soon enough, my little eight-year-old will come to understand that at that particular moment Mommy was responsibly concerned with earning a living and keeping a roof over our heads. God knows I model that for her enough, says my friend. But sometimes it takes a child or some other great teacher to remind us that love is never an interruption. Love is what life is for. And perhaps being in loving relationship with someone means we have permission to interrupt each other with higher claims.”

Every once in a while someone offers you an insight, gives you a gift of perception. Someone turns your lens just a little bit so that you get a sharper view of things and you see your life with a clearer light. I’ve been thinking about how this little eight-year-old girl sees her life, and I think maybe she’s on to something fundamental, something we often lose sight of.

I was at a ministers’ workshop not long ago with some colleagues, when one of the ministers was called home to attend to the sudden death of one of his congregants. “I’m sorry I have to leave, I’m finding this workshop on ministry very interesting. But I have to go home and do some ministry now.” And truthfully, he didn’t even notice the irony in what he was saying. In our busyness we sometimes fail to recognize that the “interruptions” are the real stuff of our lives.

Likewise, I’m always struck whenever a polite congregant calls me at my office in mid-week with some pressing personal problem and says, “Gee, Reverend, I’m sorry to bother you, you must be really busy, but I really need to talk to you.” And of course I have to wonder what they think that office is there for if not to receive just that call. It is not an “interruption” of that office to call with a need for ministry. The whole purpose of that office, its one and only reason for being, is to receive that call.

It is never an imposition; it is never an interruption of our life as a congregation to take time to minister to each other. That is precisely what our covenant as a faith community is about. You see, this institution, if it is worthy of the name, is founded upon, empowered by, solely dedicated to and shaped by its unique purpose of being a community where love is unapologetically primary – the love of its members one for another, the love of truth and justice, the love of all that is sacred and central to our humanity. This institution stands on the side of love. In this place love is never an interruption. It is the ground of our being.

One of my most favorite stories – you’ve heard me use it a dozen times – comes from the Talmud. It is the story given in response to the age-old question, “How is God known?”

“Time before time” the story goes,” when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing evenly the grain they had ground together. One brother lived alone, the other had a large family. Now the single brother thought to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed.’ So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother’s granary.

But the married brother said to himself one day, ‘It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly — because I have children to provide for me in my old age, and my brother has none.’ So, he began every night to take some of his grain to his brother’s granary.

Then one night they met each other half way between their two houses. Suddenly they realized what had been happening, and they embraced each other in love. The legend has it that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, ‘This is a holy place, and here it is that my Temple shall be built.’ And so it came to be that the first Temple was constructed in Jerusalem. For God is known where human beings meet each other, and discover each other, in love.”

We live in strange times. We’ve been conditioned to no longer be amazed to find, for example, some doctors who are too busy to take time to talk to their patients; or lawyers who smile at our naivete for expecting that our courts exist to dispense justice with compassion; or teachers too burned out to love teaching children. We’ve created some strangely dysfunctional and ineffective institutions: like hospitals where patient care is not a first priority; or schools where children do not thrive; or churches that do not preach love and do not practice charity; or misnamed “welfare” agencies often devoid of dignity or empathy for their clients.

Why is that? How does this happen, do you ever wonder? This kind of strange juxtaposition of priorities and functions that can happen whenever we confuse the substance and purpose of our lives with goals that are really extraneous, the “interruptions” of our proper intent, if you will.

And as it happens with individuals, so too it can happen with institutions. We get off track. We forget what we are supposed to be about, and the proper order of things gets confused. We are seduced away from proper priorities by the trappings and rewards of status or power or materialism or by our own workaholic tendencies.

That’s how we come to have teachers who do not delight in children, or doctors who do not care about suffering, or ministers and priests who know nothing of faith and hope and charity and who are themselves strangers to the sacred and the gracious and the prayerful. Too easily we lose sight of what empowers our professions and our lives together until before long the work itself can become meaningless and sterile.

Bill Schulz tells the story of a little church in the old South, a Unitarian congregation believe it or not, that was once racially segregated and was coming to terms with the Civil Rights era. And the congregation found itself emotionally divided over a move to change its by-laws and declare itself finally integrated.

After a heated debate in congregational meeting, finally the president of the congregation, an important business leader in the town, actively resisted the change. And one woman in the church stood up and asked the president one question which stopped him cold. She asked him, what was the purpose of the church? If we don’t stand up for this cause, then what is the purpose of this place?

And the president was profoundly humbled and moved by the woman’s question, until with tears in his eyes he responded, “The purpose of this place… the purpose of this place, I guess, is to change people like me.” And the by-law change was voted by acclamation.

We forget. We forget that all the great work of life has essentially the same source and the same great end: by what we do, by what we contribute each in our own way, by the people we grow into, by the ideals and visions we embrace and follow – we either advance the store of love and justice in the world or we diminish it.

Every time we interrupt the busyness of the world with a call to love, we throw over the scales to the side of life. We do that, you and I, from right here where we live. Until we understand that, we understand nothing.

So, here’s the question to ponder this week while you’re doing the dishes: if the pollsters came to your house this afternoon, what would your family or friends say about the importance of love in your life? Would they describe you as one who treats love as a priority or as an interruption? And what evidence could they show in your behalf?