The Golden Thread: We Come Together in Love

 O come together in truth;

O come together in peace;
O come together in joy and sharing,
Come together in knowing and caring;
Come together,
O come together,
O come together in love.

Beautiful words by Dorothy Grover, from a much loved hymn. 

They describe why I became a part of spiritual community. They are not the reason why I went from a secular singular person to one who sought out spiritual community, but they are why I stayed. I came to try and understand, to make sense of the sudden and profound changes that had occurred in my life many years ago now, changes that have continued on and on and on. I have not found the answers I was seeking by the way, in fact if anything there are many more questions today than there was then. What community has given me, amongst so many others is a space to explore those and many other questions with like hearted people. In such an environment I have learnt to not only ask and listen to the questions, but to truly live them. I came seeking answers, but it is not why I stayed. I stayed because I found something far more than I was consciously looking for. I stayed because I found community, I found true belonging. I found love. I found my heart's desire.

We come together, oh come together, we come together in love…

Now sadly of course we can’t come together as we would like, we can’t all be together to share in worship, well not physically at least. We are of course together in heart and mind, spirit and soul, some physically at Dunham and hopefully soon at Queens Road, some on Zoom from all sorts of places, and those who are reading the service at home too. We are being creative in ways of coming together, always in love. We are of course coming a little closer, step by step, with love always as our guide.

This not being able to be physically together can be particularly difficult at those times in life when we come together for rites of passage. Like the family funeral I conducted this Friday, or the Gott wedding this afternoon. Despite not being able to be together, physically, as we would like the love that runs through life can and does bind us together if we would but let it. It is the same with birthdays and other celebrations too or at times when those we care for are ill or suffering, as so many are in these challenging days, we find ways though. I saw a lovely example last Saturday as I saw Thelma and her daughter Lisa enjoying fish and chips and each others company sat in the sun in the gardens at the chapel, from a safe social distance of course.

We can still “come together in loving and caring

Oh come together, oh come together, oh come together in love.”

It brought to mind this wonderful bit of wisdom from “When all you’ve ever wanted isn’t enough” by Harold Kushner

“A life without people, without the same people day after day, people who belong to us, people who will be there for us, people who need us and whom we need in return, may be very rich in other things, but in human terms is no life at all.

I was sitting on the beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sandcastle by the waters edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all of their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and they sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me a valuable lesson. All of the things in our lives, all of the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships with other people endure. Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody's hand to hold will be able to laugh."

It also brought to mind the following verse from Matthew’s Gospel Ch 18 v 20 “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” When we come together in love, that spirit comes to life.

“O come together, o come together, o come together in love.

This is why people come together in spiritual community, why the commune. As the writer Annie Dillard put it “We are here to abet creation and to witness it. To notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

In coming together in love we create community, it is the love that we create together that binds such community together. This love is the thread that binds us together. We are all responsible for weaving this thread and repairing it when it gets damaged. It is this that binds us to one another and it this that hold us together in love.

Now as Parker J Palmer put it while reflecting on the wonderful poem “A Thread to Guide Us” by William Stafford.

“Holding on doesn’t make life any easier, but it can keep us from getting lost in the dark woods that swallow us up every now and then. Knowing we can find our way home with that thread in hand, we’re more likely to explore the darkness and learn what it has to teach us.”

Here's the poem:

“The Way It Is” by William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Now an old rarely heard word for this thread of love that binds us together in love is “yoke”. Now a yoke is a wooden bar that is fastened around the necks of two animals, connecting them together and to the vehicle or load they are pulling. In the context of community though yoke is a nurturing word. It is a humble and tender word, particularly for the most vulnerable in family, community and society, it is that loving thread that binds us together in love. In such connections we find rest, comfort, care, protection and light-heartedness. Yes light-heartedness for there is a sense of fun in this idea of yoke. Gosh how much do we miss this ability to come together in joy and laughter too. In Middle Eastern languages yoke has connotations of laying arms on the shoulders of another and dancing in cirlces and long lines. It is a familiar and comfortable feeling and fills one with delight as you get lost in the music and sing and dance and just let go without fear. To be yoked means to come together in love.

We come together in search
Of new beginnings for all,
Where understanding and trust surround us – 
Gone the hate and fear that bound us;
Come together,
O come together,
O come together in love.

The Sanskrit word for yoke is yuj. Like Yoke in the west it is a physical device used to join cattle. From this interestingly the word yoga came. Now Yoga means union, just think about this idea of something binding us together in love. Yoga though is not really a noun, a thing, it is more a verb, something that you do, like people coming together in love, to create loving community. Sue and myself have been practising yoga these last few months, since lockdown began. It is one of the many loving threads that has held us through these difficult days. It has been comical too as we have had to negotiate two dogs, particularly the disobedient little dog, not a lot of space and bodies that will not do the things that the woman on the video can do. There has been much laughter as we have yoked and joked our way through, being held in love these last weeks and months.

These principles of coming together in love will help us as we try to rebuild and rebind our communities, to create space for people to come together not only in love, but also search in the days ahead.

We come together in search
Of new beginnings for all,
Where understanding and trust surround us – 
Gone the hate and fear that bound us;
Come together,
O come together,
O come together in love.

Loving community is something that I believe everyone needs, in order to truly thrive and grow and become all that they can be.

Starhawk catches this need near perfectly when she writes:

“Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.”

So let us continue to build this community of love, where people can come together in love. As we slowly open and begin to be together again we will need a loving community even more, a place where love hold us and sustain us together. It is something that we will all be responsible for creating, but not just here, but also in our families, our communities, our world. Let us begin to repair and weave that thread of love. Let us come together, lets us go out together in love.

O come together in truth;
O come together in peace;
O come together in joy and sharing,
Come together in knowing and caring;
Come together,
O come together,
O come together in love

Amen