The Bond of Love

Something actually spiritual for a change!

Some time ago a parishioner gave me a copy of the Northumbria Community office book Celtic Daily Prayer, published by the company she worked for. I was a bit sceptical as for most people ‘Celtic Christianity’ seems to be Hello-Clouds-Hello-Sky-skip-through-the-fields stuff rather than, say, the Culdees spending hours up the waist in the freezing water of holy wells reciting Psalms. But this book turned out to be rather rigorous in its spirituality, albeit a bit rude to St Wilfrid, so that was all right.

The bit I’m reading at the moment centres on the experience of St Columba on the isle of Iona, and some of the texts come from a long poem published in the early 1900s by Fr Richard Meux Benson, founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers. My old theological college occupies the SSJE buildings in Oxford, and Father Benson is as abiding a presence there as anyone actually related to the college itself. I was surprised that he was so inspired by Columba, who didn’t seem a likely saint to have come to the attention of a Victorian Anglican priest who spent most of his ministry in East Oxford; but they were both austere characters, and Fr Benson might have felt a connection with the Irishman’s creation of a mission community among the rocks and inlets of Dark Age Scotland.

And death can never break 
the bond of love which God’s own hand 
hath wrought.

- I read this morning. One of the lines I tend, I admit, to reach for when I’ve taken funeral services for people I may not have known very well, or at all, is to speak about ‘the bonds of love which death is powerless to overcome’. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is a bit sentimental. Maybe friends and relatives seldom listen that carefully to homilies at their loved ones’ funerals, but, just in case they might, I want to give hope, but not sell the Gospel short either. Not everything makes it through the process of purgation. Yet at the same time I do believe that love comes from nowhere but God, and that therefore that must survive. What is good about us is gathered by him, and no genuine love we have shared can be lost.

And here is the great and founder of the Cowley Fathers, whose faith was nothing if not demanding, using the same phrase. It also made me think something else. If it’s our love of God which carries us into the new creation, and that love is itself a bond God’s own hand hath wrought, it too is unbreakable. What happiness there is in this, that even in our love of him, we rely not on our own frailty, but his eternal faithfulness.