Perfect Love

" When the Spirit of Truth comes, it will guide you into all the truth; for it will not speak on its own, but will speak whatever it hears, and it will declare to you the things that are to come " John 16:12-14

When I was four and beginning kindergarten early, I asked my Mother to let me go to the Methodist Sunday School. My new best friend's mother taught at the Methodist Sunday School in Bassett, Nebraska. Born in Wyoming, I had moved with my family into the front yard of my great grandmother's homesteaded farm when I was two years old. There we lived in a reclaimed one room schoolhouse. Formal discovery of God started that first Sunday in this little town on the prairie in a basement room of a small frame and brick church.

When I was ten, the same year I contracted polio and had a miracle recovery within 12 days, my Father, an Episcopalian, insisted we all, my Mother, sister and two brothers, be baptized by an Episcopal priest who came to an even smaller frame church once a month; Mother and I were also confirmed. Mother's family did not attend any church. On my Mother's side of the family, my great grandfather had come to Nebraska from Switzerland and was probably Zwingli-reform Catholic ...just as Lutherans were Luther-reformed Catholics.

Within a year, we all moved to Wyoming. We attended the Episcopal church across the street from our house, where I played the organ for eight a.m. Then, I took off my robe and walked a block to the Methodist church, where I rehearsed and sang with the youth choir. Sunday eve nings, I attended their youth meetings with my music friends. On Fridays at school, I played piano with my Southern Baptist friends and Youth for Christ.

Lots of churches later, I happened to be living in Memphis, Tennessee. Earlier, when I was living in Covina, California, w the Watts area in Los Angeles broke out in rebellion, and I had been witness to some of the anguish of the African Americans in our society and the impossible situation the L.A. police faced. Then, when Martin Luther King was slain in Memphis just after we moved there, and I saw that the white churches were denying that there was `anything deeply wrong,' I rebelled. I quit attending ANY churches at all. For years I doubted my own Christianity and began reading Scrip- ture and Christian theology and the teachings of other world religions on my own.

Then, I was unmistakably called to the ministry while living in Lansing, Michigan, but without a church. Having written music for Unitarians, I decided to study with them at the University of Chicago, where I would still be near my children. Disillusioned with my notion of what Christian teaching should be and was not, I left the seminary, re-wrote my call to a secular one and hid out for 9 years in Laramie, Wyoming. There I learned first hand about problems inherent with corporations, what it is like to run for and be in office in any governmental position, and the realities of social justice and the agencies we have in place to care for the marginalized.

And I came back to Christ, by way of a Methodist pastor who was the liaison between the churches and Habitat for Humanity, when I was chair of that group. The seminary which seemed to choose me was IIiff Theological Seminary in Denver, where I finally finished what I had begun in Chicago years earlier, a product of that love that would not let me go.¹

John Wesley, the `founder' of Methodism, is a proponent of perfect love. We are all recipients, beneficiaries of this perfect love of which he speaks. For seven years after being ordained in the United Church of Christ, my call was to a Methodist church in Northern California. Now I am back home, returned to my chosen denomination. Why not? I had tried everything else and God never once let me go because of how I questioned or sought or experimented. Perfect love does not have favorites, does not leave some out because of who they are, what they have been, or where they are going. Perfect love never leaves; perfect love waits patiently; perfect love is the Christ we adore. Thank God!