Prime Minister Tony Blair reads 1 Corinthians 13 at Diana Spencer's Funeral Service
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
I Corinthians 13: 1-8
It's hard to imagine that there are many Christians of any background who aren't aware of this luminous passage from 1 Corinthians, an epistle -- a letter -- written by the apostle Paul. We've heard it at weddings and funerals, including the memorial service for former Princess Diana in Westminster Abbey going on 25 years ago. My experience in ministry was that people who were fairly clueless about religion and scripturally illiterate would ask for this passage for their "match and dispatch" moments, even when they only a vague idea of where it was from.
This Love Passage, as its often called is one of the lectionary scripture passages for this Sunday and it got me thinking about an article I saw a few days back on the art of handwriting and the creative process in the New York Times. This sort of piece emerges from time to time, often as a nostalgic remembrance of things past, before email and texting and other forms of electronic communication. I am enough of a geezer to remember writing letters, something I never do any more, even though Ruth and I corresponded with love letters in our youth, missives which we have kept. May our children never read them.
The Times piece suggests that creative writing can be inspired and enhanced by putting pen to paper. The author of The Case for Writing Longhand: ‘It’s About Trying to Create That Little Space of Freedom’ Sarah Bahr picks the brain of another New York Times writer Sam Anderson:
Mr. Anderson, 44, said he grew up writing by hand, before the computer was common in American households. He likes that the process slows him down and puts him in touch with his thoughts. Drafting by hand lowers the stakes, he said, because it doesn’t feel like “official” writing yet, which helps him avoid writer’s block. “You write by hand the same way you make a sweater by hand,” he said. “There’s a kind of folk craftiness to it. The first step is a very personal thing — drawing yourself out of your mind and body. Then, later, you translate that into impersonal print.”
Personally, my cursive writing has dwindled over time to daily musings in my journal, which I have kept, religiously, for the past 36 years. Oh yes, and when I map out thoughts for the now occasional study group or sermon, or listen to an online seminar or podcast I use a pad of paper and pen first to jot down salient points. I'm convinced that somehow my brain grasps things better when I have that visual prompt of my own handwriting, and there is research which supports this notion.
St. Paul Writing His Epistles -- Valentin de Boulogne
I think that one of the miracles of our tradition and faith is that virtually everything we listen to regularly as scripture was handwritten in its inception. How is it possible that fragile documents survived over time, and were brought together to form the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian Testament? And that Paul's letters survived their journeys to different Christian communities of no fixed address and were cherished so that thousands of years later we read them with expectation, receiving a word which is the Word of Christ's redeeming love?
Truth be told, while the painting here depicts Paul with a quill in hand it's likely that he dictated his divinely inspired thoughts to a scribe, or amanuensis. For more than a millenium bibles were copied by hand in the scriptoriums of convents and monasteries.
My quill-tipped point is that writing was vital then, and however we hear scripture now we can give thanks for those who dipped pen into ink and were inSpirited as they listened for God's voice.
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13:9-13
"In the beginning was the Wordle..." -- and the Wordle went viral. Did you know that there is now a "green" Worlde as well? My Groundling blog today
groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2022/01/in-beg
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