A Love Supreme: Our True Essence
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
February 14, 2021
Good morning, Friends! I hope you are feeling the love this morning on this Valentine’s Day!
A couple weeks ago, I was watching a new documentary produced by Jazz Night in America on NPR Online. The documentary introduced the viewer to a, not so ordinary, church in San Francisco, CA.
On the first Sunday of every month at this church, they turn off the lights and get silent much like Quakers entering waiting worship, but then in reverent and expecting waiting they play the music of their patron saint, John Coltrane.
Yes, the famous Jazz saxophonist, John Coltrane. And the album they listen to is what some consider one of the most sacred and divinely inspired Jazz albums of all time, A Love Supreme from 1964. For jazz musicians, today, it is so sacred and personal that some refuse to perform the songs from the album.
The Reverends Franzo and Marina King founded St. John Coltrane Church after attending a Coltrane performance at a club called the Jazz Workshop in 1965. This was soon after Coltrane had openly shared that he had experienced a spiritual awakening. Franzo and Marina say that during the performance the Holy Spirit spoke to them and they knew what they were to do - start a church that focused on the spiritual experience of John Coltrane.
Now, some may consider this far out, idol worship, or even heretical, but as a lover of Jazz, as one who owns a copy of “A Love Supreme” and considers it uniquely holy and exceptional, I found this a fascinating concept.
On the inside cover of the album Coltrane writes a letter to the listener that explains the project and a long prayer, or what some consider a psalm called, “A Love Supreme.”
Michael Cuscuna, Coltrane’s producer said of the album that it projects “a spiritual serenity and inner peace that belies the turbulence that would enter his music the following year” when Coltrane would be diagnosed with liver cancer and then decline and die at the young age of 40.
Coltrane wrote to his listener,
I would like to tell you that no matter what…It is with God. He is gracious and merciful. His way is in Love. Through which we all are. It is truly A Love Supreme.
And he closes his letter almost prophetically saying,
May we never forget that in the sunshine of our lives, through the storm and after the rain – it is all with God – in all always and forever. ALL PRAISE TO GOD.
With love to all, I thank you.
John Coltrane.
Because of copyright laws, I cannot have us silence ourselves right now and listen to “A Love Supreme.” But I encourage you to go download the album or purchase the vinyl, or borrow it from the library or a friend and simply be still in the darkness of a comfortable room in your home and allow yourself to worship and feel the love that John Coltrane so passionately conveyed through this album. It also would make a wonderful Valentine’s gift to yourself or that special someone.
Now, obviously I shared about John Coltrane for more than giving you music recommendations or Valentine gift ideas. Actually, as I have learned more about Coltrane’s spiritual awakening, and study spiritual awakenings both in myself and others, it has helped me understand more about the many layers of God’s Love – that love is more than an action, more than a feeling, more than so much of what we have made it in our day and age.
In preparation for this sermon I turned to one of Richard Rohr’s Daily Devotions, one that has helped me articulate a better understanding of Love. Rohr says that,
Love is not really an action that you do. Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence.
Love is a place that already exists inside of you, but is also greater than you.
That’s the paradox. It’s within you and yet beyond you. This creates a sense of abundance and more-than-enoughness, which is precisely the satisfaction and deep peace of the True Self.
You know you’ve found a well that will never go dry, as Jesus says (see John 4:13-14). Your True Self, God’s Love in you, cannot be exhausted.
I think that is the Love that John Coltrane found – a love that was both beyond him and also flowing within and from him. A love that Coltrane described as leading him to a richer, fuller, and more productive life, a sense of inner peace, and a gift he must share with the world.
I find it interesting that when you read the stories of people’s spiritual awakenings often you find them describing being overwhelmed by God’s love.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was overwhelmed by the creative and transforming nature of love, so much that it changed his entire approach to life, ministry and activism and left him exclaiming, “Love is the only way!”
Or Mother Teresa who after a dark night of the soul proclaimed,
It is not how much we do,
But home much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give,
But how much love we put in the giving.
Even our own, George Fox would describe his awakening by saying,
I cried to the Lord, “Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils? And the Lord answered, “That it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions!” and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw, also, that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and LOVE, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God, and I had great openings.
Each of these examples speak to a similar experience and awakening to an new understanding of love.
This is what Richard Rohr articulates so well.
You get more love by letting it flow through you…If you love, you will become more loving. If you practice patience, you will become more patient. If you stop the Divine Flow, you will be stopped up...Love is not something you can bargain for, nor is it something you can attain or work up to—because love is your very structural and essential identity...
When you are living in conscious connection with this Loving Inner Presence, you are in your True Self. God is forever united to this love within you; it is your soul, the part of you that always says yes to God. God always sees God in you—and “cannot disown God’s own self” (2 Timothy 2:13).
Last week, in my sermon I introduced the idea of “Radical Metanoia” which I described as going beyond our own minds and into the mind of God. Part of that metanoia is this living in conscious connection with this Loving Inner Presence.
What we as Quakers call our Inner Light or Inner Christ, what theologians have described as the Imago Dei or the Image of God, or what Richard Rohr went as far as to say is our True Self.
It has been said and sung – They will know we are Christian by our love – by our deepest essence. It has existed within us from our beginning, but sadly we struggle too often with embracing, recognizing, and living in to it.
Returning to our text for this morning from the first epistle of John, it seems the author may have been writing to the Greater Church instead of a specific church like many of the other epistles – or at least he was writing to a larger region of churches, possibly the Persians. Hearing it again moments ago, it is clear that the author’s words are relevant to us today.
LOVE, what this Valentine’s Day is all about, is also the essence of our life and faith. In the summary of 1 John the author makes that so clear.
Let me read it again, and I ask that you listen very carefully for all 15 times in only 6 verses that LOVE is emphasized:
7-10 My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
11-12 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
It is hard not to hear the importance of love in this summary - whether it is God’s love for us, our love for one another, or the love that dwells deeply within each of us.
So, on this day, let us celebrate this perfect love – our essence, or essential identity – that Love Supreme…and may our lives become an incarnate – life-giving, and so needed Valentine to our world, today!
Now, as we enter this time of waiting worship, take a moment to consider the following queries:
1. How has love impacted my spiritual awakening?
2. Who do I struggle to love and share the love of God with? How might I show love to them, today?
3. Would others say my essential identity is love? If not, what could I do about that?