Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Why else were individuals created but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently.

C. S. Lewis

I know many Christians who've struggled, as I have, with this issue of self-love. It seems to run directly counter to Jesus' teaching! Aren't we to "give up ourselves to God's service," as the Prayer Book puts it? Aren't we to leave behind our "old man," be conformed to Christ's likeness instead?

There came a time, some twenty years after John and I became believers, that we began to feel curiously isolated. For a while after our conversions, we'd savored a wondrous new phenomenon. Community! After being onlookers at the Christian scene for years, we were now participants. It was a thrilling experience to meet a stranger's eyes and know, without a word being said, that he knew the God we knew.

For nearly ten years a small group of Christians met weekly in our living room. We didn't organize it - people simply showed up, new ones appearing, others departing in our very mobile suburb. Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, a dozen denominations in my first-ever experience of a group in which I didn't have to be the leader or the reporter or wear any other disguise. I'd never imagined such vulnerability in a gathering of people! Or such depth of caring, as we prayed each other through tragedies and triumphs.

The bonding has remained, over time and distance, with each of these individuals. But not the sense of unity: less and less were we encountering fellow Christians whose emphasis was our own. Always lots to admire, lots to learn from, but no longer any group with which we identified.

At last we decided to bring up the matter with the rector of St. Paul's Church on Nantucket Island where friends lend us their home each spring. St. Paul's is a turn-of-the-century Romanesque-revival building, as out of place among the prim wooden structures of that old Quaker whaling port as we were feeling in gatherings of Christians.

In its interior design, though, St. Paul's is all Nantucket. My favorite part of the church is the small side chapel where stained glass windows celebrate whales and gulls, and needlepoint cushions portray a lighthouse or a sandy track through the moors.

In this evocative chapel each morning of the week, the Reverend Herbert Stevens held a service of Holy Communion. Afterward, Herb would occasionally be free to have breakfast with us. Breakfast with him meant Jean's, a no-frills restaurant on the outskirts of town. In the historic center, where streets are cobbled with English stones brought as ballast in whaling ships, are some fresh-flowers-and-tablecloths breakfast places. Herb would have none of them: "They're for summer people." His chosen friends were the farmers and policemen and schoolteachers making a precarious living on the island year-round.