The Comfortable Words

Welcome to The Comfortable Words. Only, this past week has been particularly uncomfortable.

Since I prefer to think my feelings, I found myself processing by digging into the difference between uncomfortable and discomfort. Because what I felt wasn’t just uncomfortable.

I felt discomforted.

To be uncomfortable is to be not-comfortable. The prefix “un” simply means “not.”

But discomfort is something else.

This prefix des- doesn’t mean “not” — rather it implies a reversal, a lack, or a removing of a thing. As though something that was there has gone missing.

To “disinfect” is to remove infection. To “disarm” is to take away weapons.

To experience discomfort, then, is not to experience not being comfortable, but something worse — to experience a sort of nostalgia for a comfort that was but is no more. To move from a state where one knows comfort, to a state where one knows only a new absence, a felt loss of comfort.

Discomfort is the emptiness after the passing of a loved one who brought consolation to you. You feel not only the loss of them, but also the loss of the comfort they brought to you.

Discomfort is the confusion after the betrayal of a friend who brought encouragement to you. You feel not only the loss of them, but the loss of the courage they brought to you.

Discomfort is the emptiness after the revelation of the deceit and damage of a leader you trusted. You feel not only the loss of them, but the loss of the idea of trust itself.

And yet we have The Comfortable Words of Christ. And the words I found this week are these, from the gospel according to Saint John, when Jesus says to his disciples:

9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: love each other. (John 15:9-17)

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This text reads like a spiral. Jesus circles over and over around mutual love, mutual joy, mutual friendship, mutual giving and receiving.

The mutuality spins a web of sorts, threading Jesus with his disciples with the Father through the Spirit.

It’s like an embroidery of love, the stitches going back and forth until everything and everyone is knotted together and held tight — like a mended bit of fabric, or a beautiful tapestry, or one of the late Aminah Robinson’s multimedia pieces of stitched cloth and thread and leather and twigs and buttons and rags. All these wildly disparate pieces held together in a massive, structural, knit-together beauty of hanging bits and pieces — just like the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God. This is my command. Love one another.

Okay, I say to the Lord. But what when that doesn’t work? What happens when we don’t love one another? What happens then? In our discomfort?

I think we love the idea of love. And we’re fairly good at it most of the time. It’s the small fractures, though — the tiny cracks of pride and ego and lust and control. They start small and grow, don’t they? They start almost invisible, like the tiny thread of a fissure in my coffee mug, but I know that one day soon, the whole thing is going to break half apart.

We — all of us — are filled with fissures like that. We are all prone to breaking bad.

The great myth of humanity is that I am who I am only in times of harmony and success and control.

That is a lie. Or at least a partial lie. That is part of who we are. But the other part is who we are on other days, in secret spaces, behind closed doors. We, in our humanity and hubris, are like plants that reach for the sun — only it’s sin, and not the sun. And without constraint we’ll grow, stretch, find a way toward the itchy thing that tempts us. And that temptation is never a temptation toward true, self-giving, other-aimed love.

So no wonder there is so much discomfort in this world.

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So back to the beginning of Jesus’s words.

He knows we are failed and flawed. He knows how discomforted we are.

Here’s a thought — Christ himself experienced the removal of comfort. The forsaken feeling of being left alone. The world breaks bad at his expense, and what does he feel?

Lonely. Alone. Forsaken.

The God of the universe knows discomfort.

And what he does is this: he gathers us up like a mother. He stretches his arms wide and says, “Come here, come here, come here.” His wings cover over us, soothe us, warm us, comfort us.

And he says simply this: remain.

You don’t have to do anything, or go anywhere, or prove anything. You don’t have to figure it out or make sense of it. Just stay here, tucked in with me.

9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

We remain close to Jesus like a branch connected to the vine. Through growth and through pruning. Through root rot and fruitful seasons and harvests and wintertime. Through devastating drought, or wildfire, or pestilence.

We remain close to Jesus like an infant connected to her mother. Umbilical communion and consolation, and all shall be well… though not yet, of course. Not yet.

We remain close, and like a weaned child, we calm and quiet ourselves and our souls, because we are connected to the God of All Comfort.

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Remaining in simple attachment to Jesus is not an easy thing.

He is always attached to us, so in that sense it’s a constant reality.

But our attachment to that reality is tricky. When we feel our comforts removed, when things break bad, when there’s an earthquake on the hillside and the trellis gets shaken and things are uprooted, we want to run.

Yet Jesus says: remain in my love.

You don’t have to remain anywhere else. Things will fail, people will fall. When they do, we experience discomfort — the loss of a thing that once made us comfortable.

But Father, Son, and Spirit are the same yesterday, today, forever. Where were you, God asks Job, when I laid the earth’s foundation?

Remaining in Christ is the only place of real comfort — the sort of comfort that comes from existential attachment to the creator and sustainer of all things.

In times of discomfort, we feel our loss. If you are like me, you think it — you find the right words and ways to understand.

I am sorry if you feel the loss or absence of something or someone today. I am sorry if you are discomforted.

But along with me, perhaps you can close your eyes and take a deep breath.

Slow down your mind — all your thinking and processing and ruminating.

Acknowledge whatever it is you are missing. It could be the name of someone you have loved. It could be a sense of trust or safety. It could be a certainty that has gone missing.

Can you name the place where comfort is missed? Can you describe it?

Now, with me, look into that space for the thread that is the presence of God.

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In George MacDonald’s book The Princess and the Goblin, a great-great-grandmother sits in a tower spinning a thread from moonlight and spiderwebs. She gives her granddaughter a ring attached to this invisible thread and tells her that if she becomes scared or needs to find her way, she should find and follow the thread:

“Then you must lay your finger, the same that wore the ring, upon the thread, and follow the thread wherever it leads you.”

“Oh, how delightful! It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!”

“Yes. But, remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way indeed, and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too.”

Jesus gives us these words of comfort: abide in my love. Hold fast to the thread of his love. Stay — set up camp — in his love.

Right now, as you consider the space of loss or missing or discomfort you may feel, can you search prayerfully for his still, small voice?

What does it mean, that Christ calls you his friend?

What would a friend say to you right now?

Or perhaps would a friend say nothing at all? Would a friend simply sit with you, remaining with you, not leaving you or forsaking you?

Perhaps would a friend hold their end of the thread, and find their way to you?

Christ comes to the world in the midst of its mess and madness. He comes to us when we have lost comfort, and he goes out to everyone who has ever broken bad. His arms are open wide, like a mother’s arms, like a heavenly city.

3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” (Revelation 21:3)

He will remain.

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To close, a line from the late Wendell Berry’s poem What We Need Is Here, given as a prayer as we together work to remain in the loving gaze of Christ.

And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Amen.