The other day I was doing my morning prayer practice. The heart of this for me is centering prayer, which is an ancient way of praying without words or images but simply with an open, silent, posture-of-being where you consent to the presence of God’s Eternal Spirit in which we all live and move and have our being.

On this particular morning last week, I sat down to pray, and my mind settled and my heart eased into a blessed silence … for like five seconds before this song started to play in my head, with the full band, drums and bass and everything. And it just looped and looped, stuck on repeat. If someone had been watching me, it would have looked like I had headphones on, with my eyes closed just bopping my head:

Without a warning you broke my heart, takin’ it, baby, tore it apart
And you left me sittin’ in the dark cryin’, said your love for me was dyin’.
I’m beggin’ you baby, baby please. I’m beggin’ you baby, I’m on my knees.
Turn on your light, let it shine on me.

Turn on your love light, let it shine on me

Let shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Yes, folks, it’s 1961 Bobby Bland R&B hit, written for him by Joe Scott, and covered by The Grateful Dead in many of their live shows starting in 1967. Bobby Bland’s version was two-and-a-half minutes long. The Grateful Dead of course could make the song last for, well, as long as my 20-minute prayer time, which seemed to be where things were headed, in my head.

            Turn on your love-light, let it shine on me.

            Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.  

            I kept trying to do what the wise teachers of prayer and mediation say to do, where you just let it go without judgment and return to your point of focus, that silence, that bit of peace of Christ in my heart, but the song would only sweep back in with the volume turned up, over and over … until I realized …

It’s a prayer!

This is my subconscious trying to talk to God

“Let your love-light shine on me, O God!

Let your love-light shine on me.

Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.”

Let me simply bask in that light, abide in that ever-living Love Supreme.

And you know what? That did it. Once I embraced that song as a posture of prayer before God, the band went on their merry way, and my heart got calm and my mind still … for a little bit of time, until it wasn’t again.  

The good news is, with God, if we’re praying for that love-light to shine on us, it’s not like begging a fickle lover to return after deciding they don’t love us no more. Because the truth is, God’s love-light is always shining. Always, for everyone. It is we who may turn away from it and hide in shadow. It is we who can then decide to return to receive the gift of the Holy Love Supreme.

God’s love is Agape love. Universal. Unconditional.

This is a vastly different dimension of love, much wider and deeper, than the kinds of loves we as humans most often experience, in family or community or romance. Those kinds of loves are very, very important, and they have their ultimate origin in Divine love, but they are limited and conditional forms of love. A mother may love her children unconditionally, but that doesn’t mean she loves everyone else the same way. A patriot may love their country, but that love may not extend to the country next door or on the other side of the world, or even to everyone inside the nation they love. And if romantic love didn’t have the tendency to be fickle and fleeting, we wouldn’t have 99% of the songs on the radio (some of which are pretty good; some of which we wouldn’t miss).

Agape love is different. It is the love that the Holy Creator has for all and everything in this enormous and diverse universe. It is a love that is eternal and universal. It is a love that embraces each of us as we are. A love-light that shines through every corner of existence. The Love Supreme, in the words of the great John Coltrane.

All of the forms of love that we humans can receive and give and share, may have their limits and conditions, but they all can grow to be a little bit more Agape, when we allow that Agape love-light of God into our hearts. Love between parent and child can grow in seeing how so many others share that bond, or suffer from its absence, a patriot’s love can grow toward caring for peoples of many nations and more within theirs, romantic love can deepen into life-long commitment come what may.

This challenge and opportunity to grow through receiving and sharing God’s Agape love is what Jesus was all about.

This is the Good News that Jesus embodied:

Our Creator, our God,

Has created each of us and all of us

To be beloved.

At the core of who we are, at the pith of our being,

We are beloved by God.

And there is nothing we can do and nothing that can be done to us that can change that fact of our belovedness.

God loves us whether we deserve it or not,

whether we think we deserve it or not,

whether other people think we deserve it or not,

whether we think other people deserve it or not.

God loves all those God has created and is creating – God has created creation Good and Worthy of Love.   

God made the human soul and set within it a fragment of light,

a sliver of mirror to reflect the pure light of Godself, that love-light – within each soul. Any time we love someone else, anytime we receive and share love, even in our little limited human kinds of ways, we are sharing and shining out that holy love-light of the Love Supreme.

Nothing we can do nothing and nothing that is done to us can change that…

But there is much we can do and much that can be done to us that can lead us to forget this belovedness and to deny it of others, to feel it denied for us, lead us to turn from that light of God’s love, cast a shadow over that mirror in our souls.

But the Good News is:

that as we can turn away from God’s love, so we can always return.

Because God’s love-light never went anywhere. It shines on and on and on.

Nothing can overcome it. Every moment we can return and can say “Yes.”

“Yes, let that love-light shine on me, O God

Let your love-light shine through me.

Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.”

(Delivered Sunday, August 27, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge).

Image: Music Brain by Wuhuiru55 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International