28 February 2001
Kanuga Conference Center, NC
(This article was published in the Ashville Citizen-Times on Saturday 3 March 2001)
Two weeks away from the family feels like a very long time - however lovely the scenery, however friendly the locals. Something absurd happens, someone says something odd or amusing; and I think, 'I must tell my wife, she'd love that.' I look at advertisements in a local paper and think, 'The children would enjoy that.' I'm on my own, but not on my own. When I see, hear, react, the people I love best are there with me, in my mind and my feelings. It comes home to us most painfully, I suppose, in bereavement. We want to turn to someone we love to share the moment, we know they'd be glad to see what we see. We see it as they'd see it - and the absence hurts all the more.
Is this what real, grown-up love is about? Falling in love, we have a picture before our minds of the one we long for. But growing up in love, growing old in love, we've learned to share with someone how we experience the world around. We don't just see them; we see things with or even through them.
Christians have often said that love is someone else's reality living in you. It's not just an attitude to someone or something. It changes you. Someone else is living in the 'house' of your mind and your feelings. That's why, when we talk about 'living God', we don't just mean that we feel something about God. God has come to live in the house. Loving God is God's gift, God's action in us, not a thing we do, or a set of nice warm feelings about him.
Real Christian love, then, is what the Bible calls 'communion', sharing life together. I love God through the 'communion of the Holy Spirit', God's breath breathing in my lungs, God living in my house.
And if I learn what that means, I know why it is that real, grown-up love is the way it is. In all my relationships now, I've got to try and let that kind of love develop - letting other people live in me, letting my thoughts and feelings be changed by what they think I feel.
To love in communion can feel risky. I'm giving away the keys of the house. But God tells us that if we can't do this for each other, we're not letting him in.
The conference I'm at is a meeting of leaders of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide fellowship of churches focussed on the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Like all conferences, it has its ups and downs. But its purposes is to make that word 'communion' a bit more real - to educate us in love, in receiving and feeling with the hearts of people from the other side of the world, Sudan, India, Singapore (even Wales!). We hope to be changed - to grow up in love. It's the only thing that really justifies meetings like this!
But I still miss Jane and the children…
The Most Revd Rowan Williams
Anglican Archbishop of Wales