What if I did that with Love?

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,^a but have not love, I gain nothing.

We heard this reading from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 at a wedding last week, and the priest exhorted us to do everything - even or perhaps especially the most mundane things of life - with love. This is the question I have been asking myself over the past week. If I am called to do everything 'with love' how do I go about it. What does it look like to order my day 'with love', how do I do the washing up 'with love', how do I chastise a naughty toddler 'with love'?

Another question has been haunting me recently too, this one arising in a book I was reading (I must admit now, the book bored me and got thrown across the room never to be finished soon after reading this particular quote)

And suddenly, in the middle of the central nave, I realize something very important: the cathedral is me, it is all of us. We are all growing and changing shape, we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected, we don't always choose the best solutions, but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent, in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us.

― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

I have been asking myself what or who I put at the centre of my 'cathedral'. Is the inner sanctum of my cathedral reserved, as I would like to think it is, for Christ? Or does my metaphorical cathedral contain nothing more than an engorged and hideous graven image of myself?

Perhaps the two questions come together thus. Christ asks me to perform every action with love. Seeing Christ in all people around me and relating to God in my life of prayer, when my actions honour God, either in prayer or in helping others then I am acting with love. When I centre my life on Christ I cannot help but act with love. When I act with love, I cannot disentangle my life from Christ.

So in the last week, I have been trying more consciously to order my day with moments of prayer, moments to appreciate the people around me and time to practise the gifts that I have been given, knowing that writing and craftwork are calming to my soul because God made me this way. I have been washing up with a willing heart, banishing the tempting thought of resentment - 'Why should I have to wash up from breakfast and lunch' - and making an effort to notice and be grateful when my husband does the chores. I have been trying to calm myself when the little boy is misbehaving so as not to discipline him from a spirit of anger, but with the clear motive of correction.

Still, it's hard work and I haven't managed any of that quite yet. I'm still quite often a noisy gong and a clashing cymbal. But I'm working on it.