My playlist song on repeat is How He Loves by David Crowder, sung a cappella by Hallal Music.
(If you want to listen, please first pause the Music for Dreaming in the column to the right >>)
“And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
And Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about the way…O, how He loves us.”
A few weeks ago I officially graduated from Boston University after nine years working toward a PhD. Those of you who have followed this blog since it began in 2009 know that the road was rocky. At times, the journey felt more like an odyssey than a career path. Yet now, finished, and almost a year into teaching at the University of Dubuque seminary, I understand a little more C.S. Lewis’ belief that in heaven, one looks back on life and sees all joy and gratitude. Even now, it surprises me that I ever doubted whether I should (or could) finish. It is only a matter of God’s love, expressed through the many who supported me, and those unexplained moments of utter grace which only now shine with brilliance in memory. Even seeing so many lessons that took so long for me to learn, I can sing, “I don’t have time to maintain these regrets, when I think about the way…He loves us.”
Julian of Norwich captures it, too:
From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing! Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else ever!’ So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting.
This past week, I spent a whirlwind few days back in Seattle, meeting the team for the upcoming Museum Without Walls Ireland trip and celebrating my graduation with so many dear friends who have loved and spurred me on to completion. Sitting in the Ladro Caffe windowseat, a place of formation, discernment, conversations, and reflection for nearly 20 years, I catch a glimpse of that same Love, shining through all those moments, some joyful, some painful, but all caught up in this amazing reality of God’s presence.
A new chapter is being written in Dubuque, but it is all in the same Story and it gives me hope that, as I can look back and see this Love, I will be able to remember God’s hindsight gift during future seasons. We may see now through a glass darkly, but in one moment, as Tolkien writes, “the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift-sunrise.”
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