When my niece was baptized, I asked a friend to sing a song entitled "Abiding Love." I have not heard that song since, and I think the reason I chose it way back then was because she sang it so beautifully, and because I had a crush on her. I was a teenager then, and the word abiding had a limited meaning, because I had not lived long enough to know what it meant for something or someone's love "to abide." Now that I have the wisdom that comes with being fifty-something, I have a better idea.
In John's gospel, Jesus speaks of abiding in us and us abiding in him. I know that I understand that passage very differently than I did when I was in college. My Christian friends and I looked at the idea of Jesus abiding in us as having an exclusive hold on that love, because so many other students were not like us. It is easy to overlook the fact that, in the same passage where Jesus speaks of abiding love, he also speaks about the need to prune the vines every now and then. I was moved by an old column written by Walter Wink, as he referred to such a pruning process in his own life. He likened it to cooking in the fires of purgatory, and then reflected on its true meaning for him: Something in me stayed with the process simply because God was in it. This, too, was a way to abide. "Abide in me and I in you," even in the purgatorial fires of individuation. Abide in me, even when it feels as if you are being consumed. Abide in me, for there are branches that, when pruned, can be used to build the inferno in which you can be cooked, and cleansed, and slowly shaped into a human being.
I like to think I have become a better human being as a result of the pruning in my own life. That pruning has come in the form of reprimands, encouragement, loss, love, rejection, wilderness wanderings, mountaintop experiences and God's gracious forbearance in waiting me out when I have felt rebellious. Abiding love - God's assurance that we will not have the last word.
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