Beloved

Gospel for the First Sunday after the Epiphany:

Matthew 3:13-17
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" 15 But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."

Beloved. Today's Speaking to the Soul rather took my breath away. It seems like a simple little post over there, a short little guided visualization meditation. And yet there is holiness within that little word that catches me up every time I hear it: beloved. Love gets over used today, so does family. Everyone it seems is family, your church, the people you work with, your sports team. Everyone loves one another. Don't believe me, just listen to a few minutes of political candidates fawning over the voting masses.

But beloved remains unscathed, it still holds the sacred power bled out of so many of our words. It still has the ability to stop me in my tracks, turn me around, and send me (teary with joy) to my knees.

The meditation today asked good questions, profound questions. Most obviously what exactly does the word "beloved" mean? It sounds old fashioned, formal, romantic perhaps. It speaks of something deeper and more mysterious than when we say "I love ice cream." And yet something about that word keeps us from using it every day. How often have I called someone a beloved? I'm afraid to say, it isn't often.

Beloved. The dictionary defines it this way:

–adjective

1.	greatly loved; dear to the heart.

–noun

2.	a person who is greatly loved.

I'd like to explore a more active definition. Beloved - Be loved - being love. In other words: one, on behalf of whom, we act out of love. It is love being that in response to our beloved's words assuring us we don't have to go with her to the hospital for that test we reply "I know" and go anyway. Being love makes us sit quietly and listen when we really want to talk. Being love causes us to leap with joy when our beloved smiles, and drops a weight of lead into our heart at the sound of their tears. Being love means we welcome both the heart leap and the heart lead and carry them with gentle, open hands. Being love makes us the safe harbor for a battered soul, a listening ear, a lifting joke, even a shared rant. Being love makes prayer a constant lifting up with God, for love itself is prayer.

Being love does not have to mean romance, though it can. In a society that has lost sight of love in place of sex we might forget, but Beloved is for our sister, brother, mother, daughter, or friend every bit as much as it is for our lover. That's important because it is love, being love, that sustains us. Just as we would die of thirst without water, or waste away in starvation without food, without beloved we will just as surely die. And just as one food alone cannot give our bodies all they require for life and health we must widen and deepen and broaden our hearts as well. We need to be surrounded, upheld, enfolded by souls we call beloved and who in turn are love to us.

And at our center, at the deepest part of us it is God who teaches us the meaning of being love. It is from Love itself that we must take our pale mirror image and polish it our whole lives, learning with our Beloveds how to live into that mystery. It is through that human Christ baptized by his cousin in the Jordan that our human ears have been opened. For God loved us from before our birth, from before the time the first molecules of us knit together in the womb. We however were deafened by our guilt, it is through Christ we can learned to hear those blessed words spoken to us as well there in the deep well of our souls: "This is my Beloved."