The Preacher & The Participant
By Rachel Gieger
For someone who has talked a lot about love, I have felt rather unloved in my lifetime.
I started a ministry in college centered on real love and helping women out of sexual addiction. I spoke to them weekly of real love, encouraged them towards it, and told them they deserved it. I was handed a microphone and stood on platforms and spoke of the redemption of love, how it permeates your wrongdoing and fills you with hope. I waxed eloquent about love to my friends, my university, random teenagers in youth groups, even here.
I think it’s okay to recognize that at times, I have been allowed to be a preacher of love. But deep within me, something unhealed, unrecognized, creeping, and hidden twisted my emotions and thoughts. Something prevented a necessary integration--the preacher of love that resided in my head and spoke through my mouth couldn’t make its way down to my heart. I have felt irreconcilably alone, completely misunderstood, and doomed to fail when it comes to love, despite my occasionally wise words. The war between the preacher in my head and the poverty of my heart raged within me, resulting in deep anxiety, doubt, and so much fear.
I felt a tide turn when I picked up Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. He spoke of being a bystander of love, instead of a participant. This came from a man who taught at Ivy League divinity schools – if anyone could wax eloquent about love, it was him – but, like me, he didn’t feel it often, instead he felt deeply afraid.
Because he wasn’t participating.
Being a preacher of love gives you a certain safe distance – a hardly qualified vulnerability that, in reality, calls for very little risk. If I talk about love and walk off the stage, I may not see, let alone meet my audience. Writing here puts my words on a webpage, but requires no risk of rejection, abandonment, misunderstanding, or any other pain that so often accompanies love. Holding degrees in your hand and being asked to give yet another talk are all well and good, but without participating, without actual love, they’re nothing. Preaching love with a slew of inspiring words may leave us with a heap of accolades, but if we think it fills our need to actually understand and receive love, it will leave an impossible chasm.
Being a participant of love, on the other hand, requires risk. Nouwen wrote an entire book based on Rembrandt’s depiction of the Prodigal Son because it jostled something loose inside of him – he needed to make the journey from preacher to participant. I realized I need to make the journey from preacher to participant. It’s finally hitting me that maybe that’s why the experience of love has been so profoundly humbling. I have not been who I thought I would be in love. I have not said what I thought I would say. I have not felt all that I thought I would feel. But, I feel an integration – a communion, a reality slowly but surely piercing its way through me. I have written love letters to my beloved filled with eloquence, yes, but also deep regret, fear, questioning, joy, stumbling and longing. I have watched as real love required me to let go of the wisdom and eloquence I felt as a preacher, the safety I felt behind the barriers. Becoming a participant of love meant letting go of ideals, pressing deep into the fear that had its claws around me for so long, and being. Being weak. Being vulnerable. Being sinful. Being intrinsically good. Being me.
A few days ago, my best friend got down on one knee in front of me and asked me to be his wife. I didn’t say what I thought I would say, I wasn’t wearing what I thought I would be wearing, and I still felt a whole range of both positive and negative emotions in the days following. But saying “yes” meant leaving the life of the distant, eloquent preacher behind and accepting the life of the poor, weak participant. A ring slid onto my finger, just like the Father did for the Prodigal Son. I did not have to spew words of wisdom or embody charitable virtue, I just had to stand there and say yes. The reality that pierced Nouwen pierces me now: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).
Preaching, without participating, amounts to nothing. Only preaching born from participating can bear fruit.
The value of love is not in how much you can preach about it or how many people you inspire. It’s in the drawing out and the silencing, the awakening and the changing, the humbling and the rejoicing. The value of love is in how much it makes you participate in something greater than you; something transcendent and divine that refines you, destroys the parts of you that kept you imprisoned, and obliterates the hesitancy that keeps you a bystander. Talk after talk can be given, article after article can be written, but only participating can bring true wisdom.
Only participating can save you.
I have written here many times about love and I never said what I thought I would say, what my preacher mind planned on saying. But I have said what participation has taught me: that love is unpredictable and ungraspable, that it is unconditional, that it is quiet and undying, and that it inevitably changes you. Only Love Himself can preach these things and only in participating can we have hearts to listen.
