Sidewalk art!
Witty and theologically on the money!
This is a ‘bench’ next to a Gautrain bus stop.
One of the people I return to over and over again when my clarity of purpose fades, is Gordon Cosby — the founder and pastor/prophet of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. Listen:
Jesus makes it crystal clear. Our work is to become love, and from the state of being love, we are to love. He sums it up this way: “Love one another as I have loved you”. To fail to become love is to fail life. It is to fail to become human.
No matter how varied and rich our experiences, how honoured we’ve been, how great our achievements, we will have missed what life was all about if we do not become love. We will not at all be ready for the only milieu that matters, the one we will enter when we are poured out at death.
I think one of the great failures of ministers like myself is that we have exhorted people to love, and we have deplored the lack of love in the world, yet we have not become love. We have not known how to instruct our own souls in the art of loving.
Suppose I really hear Jesus say: Gordon, do you love me? How will I stop answering in generalities? What will be my specific practices that will bring inner change? Has love become my primary work, my central activity, my core being?
I think Jesus is saying, if you aspire to love one another as I have loved you, then see one another as I have seen you. I see you as sacred. You are precious beyond any measure of preciousness. Accept that I see you this way. See every person you meet as I see you. Learn to experience yourself and others with reverence.
There is more in each of us that is beyond what we can grasp. Will I dare to see it? In the person who is telling me off? In the one who is trying to get closer than is comfortable, in those who are pressuring me? Will I dare to enjoy the presence of the sacred even in those who annoy me?
To love is not to try to solve anything about a person, not to try and fix a person. It is not to do so much as to be. Just be open to God’s sacred creation. Just love what is.
With the desire to grow in love, Alan
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People Make Places
I thought I’d bring to your attention the walking tour (2 hours) the Cape Town Partnership is conducting next week Tuesday 12 November. Andrew Putter and myself will facilitate a walk around the east city area: a chance for people of different backgrounds to have some constructive chats around some interesting places and worlds in the city that they walk past daily but may not have necessarily engage with. This includes vibrant afro-cosmopolitan stretches in the city, the daily routes used by trolley pushers, some of the experiences of informal traders, and the organisations such as the Service Dining Room that help marginalised groups on the street.
There is no set agenda or expectations. The purpose of the walk is to rather get some people together, chat and just come out from the experience stimulated in some way. Encountering something that can hopefully plant a small seed.
We start from 6 Spin Street at 9:30 next Tuesday. If you would like to attend please tell Adrienne.
