Love too big for words

I am writing from your national Disciples camp where I am working as camp staff this summer. I am currently lying on my stomach in front of the cross at Watters Garden writing on pen and paper because my computer broke this morning. I've been trying to decide for a couple of days whether or not I wanted to write about Christmount. It has a kind of presence that gets in your face and won't let you go. It's peaceful here, but it's a peace that pushes you into something bigger.

The ideas that have shaped my life the most come from this place. At least, that's the way that I remember it. Camp was where I learned that loving people is not just being agreeable all the time. Really loving people is a lot harder than that. Camp is also the place where I learned the importance of prayer.

During training week, I got to spend an hour every day in solitary prayer. I would like to be able to say that this happens every day all year round, but college tends to eat away at the time I get to spend just with God. My devotional material lately has been books of poems by religious mystics, including Teresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi.

I absolutely love these mystics. I really like the way their poems acknowledge the paradoxes of God — a God that transcends human thought but is at the same time as close to us as we are to ourselves, a God as complex as the universe but is at the same time pure and unchanging, a God that is all-powerful and yet infinitely merciful and compassionate. I like the way that, even as they write, they acknowledge that all words fail at describing this God. I like the delight that they take in him, and the way they discover him anew in every bit of life and creation.

What I like most about these mystics is the way that they talk about love. They talk about a love that is as far-reaching and compassionate and complex as God himself, a love that is God himself. And then they say that this incredible God is someone we can know, and that this incredible love is something we can participate in. The two, God and love, become almost synonymous. In loving others we come to know God. In knowing God, we come to love him in the people around us.

Maybe all of this seems obvious to you, or maybe a little ridiculous. To me my words sound inadequate; I know that I am not doing these ideas any justice. Perhaps that is why so many of these writers use poems — they are better for pointing to the inexpressible. The words of these mystics echo what I first learned at church camp, about loving God and loving neighbor. They push the standards of love to God-size proportions. That's something I don't hear in many other places. I hear a lot of talk about God that reduces him to one or two simple roles — creator or judge. I hear a lot of talk about loving people that reduces it to merely tolerating everyone or being very polite. I find myself wanting something more than that. I find myself wanting to participate in this great, all-encompassing, unimaginable compassion that these mystics are trying so desperately to describe.