Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
In worship we enter with reverence into communion with God and respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Come to meeting for worship with heart and mind prepared. Yield yourself and all your outward concerns to God's guidance so that you may find 'the evil weakening in you and the good raised up'.
Love. The promptings of love and truth in our hearts. Surely it all comes down to this. “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (1 John 4.16b)
[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1.15-17)
If in God all things hold together, then as God is love, all things hold together, coinhere, in love. The presence of God must surround all that is, bathing each quantum in love. In all that rejoices, God is there, rejoicing. In all that suffers, God is there, suffering. (Thibault, Peter Abelard’s friend in Helen Waddell’s eponymous novel, understood this. You can read the heart-breaking passage here.)
Since God is love, then in the end we cannot fall out of love, any more than we could escape God. And so in worship, in the silence for which I long so much these days, we yield ourselves to the love that is before all things…
*Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love Ch.86
Picture: Mike Farley
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