The Price of Love

Prostitution & the Pastoral Life

Thomas Merton, 20th century monk, poet, social critic, and spiritual writer, had a theophany, a sudden awareness of the presence and light of God in his life. He was standing on the corner of 4th & Walnut in Downtown Louisville when he was overwhelmed with a sudden insight that caused him to delve even more deeply into a pursuit of social justice for all humanity. The insight, he exclaimed, had to do with this not-so-subtle reality: "I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people." He saw them, as it were, walking around shining like the sun.

The transfiguration of the community around him. A renewed and reconciling experience of the people of God.

And the word Merton used to articulate such an experience?

Love.

My 4th & Walnut moment has been a bit more like a slow, dull, subtle ache than an acute, overwhelming pang. I have, in a sense, marinated in it for a while rather than flashing as if in a pan. Nevertheless, the experience has been similar to that which Merton speaks of as a life-transforming moment.

It occurs to me every now and then, though here lately, it's been more often than not. It is, mind you, a daring act of risk and vulnerability to even name it, for doing so increases the odds (infinitesimally, I might add!) that the experience (and I with it) will be despairingly, tragically, and grossly misunderstood. Alas, it is high time I give voice to what is often-times an overwhelming facet of the life I live.

Love.

I love.

I love the congregation I serve. I love them, every one. The ones who are present and near, the ones who are a few paces away but who are nonetheless a living, breathing part of the family of our faith that is First Presbyterian Church of Owensboro. I love the community of which I am a part, with all its strangenesses and idiosyncracies. I love the people who live beside me, around me.

I love them all. I do.

It is increasingly difficult to explain or demonstrate what I mean by such a profession in a world whose language in general is becoming anemic and thin at best. Suffice to say that I have known love before and am the thankful recipient of it a thousand times over. I have been victim of a few things, it's true, but lovelessness has never and will never be one of them. I think I know love when I see it, when I feel it. I could be wrong. That is always a possibility. Ultimately, however, that doesn't matter. Love - and the many splendored ways I have experienced it - is not about what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps one day we all of us will agree to agree on that tiny but world-altering affirmation. Until then, it will remain necessary to say it often. Love is a gift. And that is the long and the short of it. Let us not stand around pointing fingers at it in judgment.

That, though, is another story.

I am a lover of art, good art especially, art in all shapes, sizes, forms, and kinds. One thing I despise greatly is the propensity of some to explain away art - its beauty, mystery, and consequence. Art doesn't need to be explained, only experienced. The art of loving is in many ways also not to be explained, only experienced. As such, it seems prudent that I allow the art that is the loves I've known and the love I now know to stand on its own, without an explanation, without illustration, without anything said about it at all.

You will simply have to trust me on this.

My cup overfloweth. Love abides in me and I in it. I scarce can take it in.

Which is what brings me to what must be my deepest, saddest, most lonely frustration. As is typically the case for me (that is, when I am at my best), I understand it best in a positive bent, and I can access it most easily when it is packaged in the language of my dreams.

Since the 1960s, January brings a day in which we celebrate another kind of dream of another kind of dreamer. I have a dream, too, though, you know?! A dream about freedom.

I have a dream that my life, my life's work, the place I carry out my life's work, and the people I stand beside in the carrying out of it will all be changed by freedom.

I have a dream that I will one day find a group of people - perhaps the very group of people I so love and with whom I serve even now - who will walk up to my front porch one sunny May morning each of them holding a pen, each of them longing to sign on the dotted line saying that they intend never to become an institution. That they never want to have another building, another budget, another business meeting again. That they never want to pay me, because I never want to be paid. That they will still give of their lives, their talents, their treasures, but for the sake of the community around us, and never for the group. That they want simply to gather together some place warm where the acoustics for hearing God are good and where they can simply pray, sometimes in silence, sometimes aloud, but always together. Some place where they can talk freely about the pain and suffering and hunger of those who live nearby. Some place where they can promise again that they will never become an institution. Some place where everyone shares the duties. And, yes, we would be in violation of our polity to do so, but hey, it's a dream, and dreaming is free, even from the polity police. We would gather some place to pray and to talk and someone, anyone, will stand to take her turn to proclaim the gospel; someone else would stand to administer the Eucharist. We would become truly a communion of the saints, where we were all priests, and no one was left outside to wonder how to get in when "getting in" was never an option for them in the first place. NO. Not in this dream. Here, everyone who wants to be there can be there, and if they sense themselves called to baptize a baby, let mine be the first to the font.

Oh, and during the times when we are not gathering as a group of believers in worship and service, I would be honing a skill or a trade marketable enough to earn a living wage so that I could do the work that I do and not get paid for it. That's right. I wouldn't take pay. I'd serve with my life, but in freedom for everyone. No Terms of Call, no salary package, no benefits. Just you. Just me.

You sense now my struggle. I love the people I serve. And while I know (intellectually) that I am not being paid to love them, sometimes it feels like I am. Allow me the indulgence of reiterating myself: I love the men, women, and children of First Presbyterian Church and of Owensboro, Kentucky. I love them. But depositing a check every month with the name of that institution at the top of it feels an awful lot like I'm being paid to be overwhelmed by the grace of God that is alive and present in them.

I don't enjoy feeling like I'm being paid to love. You know what that is, right? When you get paid to love? I know there are people who can keep those two things separated, but I don't know anymore if I am one of those people. I want nothing more than to be able to climb the stairs into that pulpit one day with hands calloused and back sore from a rough-and-tumble job that kept me out too late the night before, and with a voice hoarse from shouting of my gladness, and with a heart so full of love that I can't keep from singing. And then to speak the first word of my first sermon in that first service of the first church that finally understands what it means to be a priesthood of believers, doubters, cynics, and skeptics, which is not much different than that motley crowd that gathers on every Lord's Day as it is. And then I'd like to walk away knowing that those people were able to empty themselves and their wallets for the good of God's hungry, thirsty, tired, and homeless people, rather than to prop me up in comfort.

Then again, it's only a dream. Perhaps now I am left to live with this, the price of love.