Living Out Love

Oct 20 / Kathi Gatlin
If I were sitting across from you, I would ask you how you are doing. There is so much happening in the world that tending to one another is essential for our well-being. My heart struggles to understand the divisions, the noise, and the constant stream of information—both lies and truth—all mixed up together. It is exhausting.

Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry have been voices in my own journey through these chaotic times. In particular, Dorothy Day lived in a stressful time with the Depression, wars, social unrest, and extreme poverty. As I have studied her life, I have found that I admire her tenacity to speak truth to power represented by the institutions surrounding her.

Dorothy believed in Scripture, and reading it shaped her view of the world, individuals, and herself. Her relationship with God went beyond the words of Scripture on the page – she lived out the incarnational faith that formed her understanding of love.

She wrote this in her book called The Long Loneliness.

“What we would like to do is change the world – make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do.… We can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”

Dorothy recognized the power of very small individual actions in caring for people, in meeting their needs, and spreading the hope that fueled her own actions. What does she ask for? For God to enlarge our hearts to love. She shares how to view others in this way in her book titled On Pilgrimage.

“When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it. St. John of the Cross said that where there was no love, put love and you would take out love.”

What does it mean to see Christ in everyone, even the person you may continue to struggle to understand? Genesis 1:26-27 states that all humankind is created in the imago Dei, the Image of God. Quakers speak about recognizing that of God in every person. What would it look like if we considered that a true reality?

For me, it means that God names the person in front of me as beloved and desires a relationship with them as much as God desires a relationship with me. My understanding of God is partially true and partially untrue, just as theirs is. Neither one of us has a full understanding of God, of love, of the world, or of anything, really.

So, can I trust God to meet the person in front of me as well as I trust God to meet me in a growing understanding of faith, of love, of reality? That is a lot of trust, isn’t it? But really what else do I have to ground my own understandings and faith in?

Dorothy invites us through the quote from St. John of the Cross to put love in where there is no love – so love regardless. And that goes back to the first quote – trusting my very small pebble of love to ripple through the world and spread hope. That is a very big ripple.

Wendell Berry’s quote from an essay he wrote about the Gospel of John brings this home for me.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

There is a lot packed into Wendell’s words. If it all starts with Love, then love, through us, redeems and heals the world. We can come together, reconcile differences and divides, and bring each of us to a sense of at-one-ment with God. Jesus spoke about this unity between the Father and the Son, and those who come after. Could this be true?

I believe so. Scripture tells that story. Doctrine, what people say Scripture says, often struggles to allow the difference, but Scripture tells a healing journey for the world. And where does it start? Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry both claim love.

Love starts with me and with you. We begin the journey of loving ourselves, not judging the parts of each of us that we tend to cut off. That allows us to recognize our judgment toward others, which allows us to open our hearts to love. And all along the way, we can begin to return God’s gaze of love in each of our lives. As Dorothy shared, it is a small pebble that ripples far beyond our reach.

So, where do we begin? Just a little pebble splash each day…

Kathi Gatlin
Kathi Gatlin founded Boldly Loved to bring together her two greatest passions: spiritual formation and teaching. In this, she utilizes her M.Ed. earned through George Fox University and her D.Min in Leadership and Spiritual Formation from Portland Seminary.

Her greatest joy is walking alongside others, individually and in groups, in their own spiritual journey, sharing ways of understanding God anew through contemplative prayer and teaching, and to see them grow in the depth of their own understanding of who God is and who they are in relationship with God.

Kathi is a spiritual director, supervisor, writer, spiritual formation group facilitator, retreat speaker, leadership mentor. For more information about Kathi, check out www.boldlyloved.org