Love, laugh and relate ... by Bill Lewellis

[The Morning Call, Saturday, April 19, 2008]

“There is a story about the Greek gods. They were bored, so they invented human beings; but they were still bored, so they invented love, then they weren’t bored any longer. So they decided to try love for themselves. Finally, they invented laughter so they could stand it.”

That voiceover of Morgan Freeman intones Feast of Love, a movie about tangled relationships.

Love, laugh and relate.

My guess is that the most profound mystery embedded in our DNA – who we are, why we are, how we are to live, where we are headed –is that we are created to relate, to be in relationship. It may be the best clue to reality.

The most introverted person among us yearns deeply for shared intimacy – even if the yearning is not acknowledged until after breakfast.

We need others: to be and to become. We need to give, to receive, to share, to shore up, to be supported. We need to love. It’s the magic and the mystery of life.

That we are so created reaches deeply into the divine mystery we call Trinity. For Trinity is simply the name our Christian tradition has given to the shared, giving, loving life together of God whom we name Father/Mother, Son and Holy Spirit.

God’s “is” is being-in-relationship, being-in-community. It trickles down. We experience it, even if we won’t own it.

You may have witnessed something like this at the beach: children playing in the sand at the water’s edge, building a castle, with gates and tower and moat. A wave knocks it down. We expect the children to cry. Instead, they run up the shore, away from the water … laughing, before sitting once again on the sand, building anew.

Every-thing we make rests on sand. Even beliefs.

The Latin word for “I believe” is credo, from which we derive creed. Going deeper into the Latin root, we discover the Latin word for heart, cor.

The wordplay suggests that someone, not something, is at the core of believing … as in “I set my heart on God, on Jesus Christ, on the Holy Spirit.”

Can I give my heart to something? To some belief? A belief, too, is a thing. Yes, I can expend a great deal of energy and anxiety on something, even a person I’ve objectified; it seems to me, however, that I can give my heart only to someone, to a person, to a community of persons.

Setting my heart on something, even some belief – a kind of drive-by believing – apart from giving my heart to God, apart from setting my heart on God’s dream, will turn out badly. The wave will come.

Only relationships endure, relationships we nurture and give our hearts to. Not all relationships endure – still, only relationships, as opposed to things, endure. Children know this… until they are taught, here and there, to unlearn it in favor of all that other stuff about things.

Life … religion … is about relationship. That is so because relationship is at the heart of the reality that does not rest on sand.

We know, somehow, that we have been created to love and to relate. And, yes, we know that comes with vulnerability. To stand it all, we laugh.

[Canon Bill Lewellis has been communication missioner for the Diocese of Bethlehem, the Episcopal Church in 14 counties of northeastern Pennsylvania, since 1986, and canon theologian to the bishop since 1998.]