Feast of Christ the King
(Painting by William Holman Hunt)
There exists an intricate bond between our capacity to become fully human, the gift of loving and being loved, and the ability of sharing. Parents instinctively recognise this bond in the development of their children; “share with your brother, share with your sister…”.
This is the crucial developmental transition towards shared intentionality, experience, and moral values. For love to be love, it must give itself totally and freely, and without expectations. As soon as we attach a reward to the act of sharing, this ‘love’ becomes a transactional commodity, a charade!
A child maturing by itself in the wild is unable to enter any love bond relationship and moves into adulthood without anything that vaguely resembles a culturally competent ‘person’.
From this void, the range of disorders that infest our world since the time of Cain and Abel are characterised by a lack of empathy and remorse, callous aggression and violence, a hypersensitivity towards criticism or rejection, glibness, shallow effect, and manipulation. These are all symptoms and cries for help; without love, there is an emptiness within the centre of our being that nothing else can fill… And so always at war with itself, it must shout its’ desperate need, “look at me, I am deserving, I am the one … The first, the greatest, the best …”
Yet in the silence of solitude, it is the gentlest breath of the spirit, our soul, that is touched by the sovereign source of all that is. This is love that must forever in this present age called “Now”, give everything that it is, to the other. Love knows and acknowledges the other and can do no other because love flows with light that is both separate entities, yet also, one with the other.
The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along. – Rumi
Love totally given, totally received, and totally returned; this is not hierarchical but a dynamic dance to the music of creation. Love could never look on the beloved in grey drab attire while itself sitting in embroidered silk upon a throne, for love must give everything to the other. Love discarded for one is love discarded for all. Love forgotten for one is love forgotten for all.
Forgotten and discarded; no longer considered of any value! The sadness of our elderly and babies now abandoned at hospital doors so that we may enjoy our Christmas holidays.
How many know the true suffering of being a “nobody” in the eyes of authority and power.
And if you want to know what it means to be a “nobody”, walk in the streets of Jerusalem. Arabs and Jews, brothers and sisters, who pass each other on the street in total denial of the others’ presence; a no-body.
Stand in the queues at South African Social Security grants office to experience being that “nobody”.
How many little ones, the minors, know the despair when their guardians and the gatekeepers of their shared resources, feed only themselves while others go hungry.
How many know the hurt of being relegated inferior with the barbed comments about their disordered sexual orientation, their weight or strength or failures or looks.
Do we see the winners up there, the ones with authority and power, the ones who have got it all together, these are the new kings of our day who glory in their own light compared to our own ‘little grey lives’?
The high titles and the high hats of those who stand on the podium of authority and law but have forgotten the author of their power.
Perhaps too we flirt with the kingdom of this world. Perhaps we have forgotten the revelation of God, in Gods’ creation and in Holy Scripture; “I Am that I Am and… I Am not like you”.
Our intoxication and our addiction to the glory of the kings of this world has lasted millennia. Perhaps we have also invested our hope, our spirituality, and our religion in this worldly glory. Here in the Empire of this world, we will find every Word of revelation, every Word of Jesus, perverted for personal glory and the rot of subterfuge and control.
800 years before the Christ event, the prophets of God warned against our choice of worldly kingship and glory. When we place our hope in our own power and achievements, the illusions of our mind, then that hope will surely fade like the mist before the morning sun.
Love always respects and obeys the will of the other. When we turn away from this great sovereign Love, mangling and mashing love to our desires, our choice is respected. But Love is always there waiting for us to return, to receive and to give. Let us hurry.
- The Church Year and Advent - December 1, 2024
- Easter Sunday Reflection: The Way – Love Overcomes Violence & Death - March 29, 2024
- Palm Sunday Reflection: Re-Espousing And Anointing - March 22, 2024
