Master teachers have a way of saying something that leaves you thinking about what they said days afterwards.

Dan Christian is such a teacher, and he offered up a number of intriguing mind-soul-heart morsels for 150 of us to chew on, in the south transept of our sanctuary last Sunday, as sunlight streamed in through stained glass.

Dan was talking about the experience of Hell, as imagined by Dante. And what he said, that still has me chewing, is something along the lines of this …

“The one thing that everyone in Dante’s Hell shares in common with one another is a preposition: against.”

Dan wondered aloud in our sanctuary-turned-classroom what he has wondered aloud with his high school students for years: perhaps a more life-giving, heavenly preposition to embody and strive for, as we live our lives on earth, is with.

“But we need something even more than with,” one of his students recently challenged. “We need something more like with-towards-in.”

With-Towards-In.

With-Towards-In.

With-Towards-In.

What a fascinating new preposition! So … dynamic. So … relational. So … inclusive. So … one-ing.

In this new preposition, can you hear these ancient prophetic words?

Hear my people, the Lord our God, the Lord is One … and … Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did to me.

What about the words of the modern-day prophet, whose life and memory we honor this weekend?

In a real sense all life is interrelated. All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be …This is the interrelated structure of reality.

And this old Christian hymn:

We are One in the Spirit
We are One in the Lord
We are One in the Spirit
We are One in the Lord
And we pray that our unity will one day be restored
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Let us pray … let us act … let us move … and be moved …

With-Towards-In.

Amen.
Cristina+