The Christian religion, whatever the franchise, puts great store on the word ‘love’. The divine essence and motivation are said to be love. Jesus is said to have preached, told stories, and practised love. And the Christian Scriptures have embedded within examples of the same.

Yet, the Church over the centuries, whatever the franchise, has frequently and spectacularly failed when it comes to love. Whether it be condoning wars or patriarchal abuse, or supporting systems of economic, racial, and gender injustice. It’s not hard to come up with a list!

Let’s, as ministers sometimes do, imagine Church starting again. From scratch so to speak. And imagine pausing a lot of the doctrines, traditions, and practices we’ve inherited. Even the good ones. Putting them aside, or in storage. To declutter if you like.

Then go on to imagine, in order to get at the heart, what is the one thing, the most important thing, around which all other things find their place and rhythm. And I would suggest that one thing is learning to love.

Which is not as simple as it sounds.

When we are babies, we learn love by receiving it. An attuned caregiver positively, responsively, interacts with us – cuddling, smiling at us, talking kindly to us. The caregiver prioritizes the child over many other things, for these positive actions (for example returning a smile with a smile) take time and lots of repetition. Of course, such caregivers, do much more besides – including feeding, warming, and changing us.

All these actions are part of the matrix of love, and evolve as the child grows. It is this positive loving attunement that helps grow the brain architecture – physical and psychological – for trusting human relationships.

Sometimes the growth of that architecture gets disturbed. Sometimes by unforeseen circumstances. Sometimes by trauma. Sometimes by loss. Unrepaired the child may not learn to trust but to fear.

And maybe that’s the starting point for a reimagined Church: we are here to repair. A repair shop. A repairing community. Repairing our ability to trust, our ability to love.

For as we grow from child to adult, and then age with the decades, we can carry with us the weakened or fractured architecture of the mind and soul caused by criticism, violence, bullying, and being deprived of unconditional love. We learn to live with some of the damage that has been done to us, and we try not to visit such damaging behaviours on to others.

I once belonged to a little church where everyone was unfailingly good to each other. This little church was in the middle of one of New Zealand’s most economically impoverished areas. Life was hard, very hard. And each Sunday people would walk to this little oasis to get away from the hardness. There in that tired but beloved building, people would help each other, be kind, smile, and never express criticism or anger towards each other. They came to church for a lifting of their spirit.

I think that little church was a repair shop. Repairing the ability to trust, the ability to love.

Glynn

(Image: Todd Kent, Unsplash).