Near the end of his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote,
My love is my weight. I’m carried by it wherever I’m carried. Through your gift we catch fire and are carried upward; we go up in flames, and up we go. In our heart we ascend the ascending staircase, and we sing the song of the rising steps. By your fire, by your good fire, we go up in flames, and there we go, since we go up to the peace of Jerusalem; since I rejoice in those who said to me, “We will go to the Master’s house.” Good will is going to set us in the right place there, in such a way that our will is for nothing but to remain there for eternity.¹
These words, by means of their poetry and imagery, describe why we go to church. Let me unpack the quote to tell you why I think this is true.
“My love is my weight.”
What we desire, what we love, acts as the gravitational pull on our personhood. Love is nourished by presence, by hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. Church, at its best, involves all the senses, and it involves the mind and spirit. The primary purpose of the life of the church is to reveal Divine love and to incite human love for the Divine. So, in a practical way, Christians go to church to be present to the force of love, to feast on it, and to let our minds be filled with it. We go to church to be moved by the beauty, truth, and goodness of what we desire. We go to church to be present to the gravitational pull of love in our bodies, in our minds, and with our strength. This is why we kneel and stand. This is why we bow and approach the altar with reverence. This is why we listen to the strange, hard words of Scripture and to preaching. This is why we love one another and exert our love for the world. We go to church to spend our time within a gravity that begins to act on our lives.
This is one of the reasons it is so important to be rigorously beautiful in our worship. We the Church must read our Scriptures with dignity, wrestle with Scripture and theology in our preaching, sing with full voice hymns thick with truth and heavenly glory, speak the Creed thoughtfully and with humility, offer our prayers in the Resurrection hope, and, most importantly, approach the Eucharist, the love feast of the Church, with open hearts, and reverent awe. We as the Church must offer to the human soul the strong food of love, which nourishes and sustains.
Where there is no beauty in the Church, it is hard to love. Beauty is compelling; it elicits worship. Beauty can be simple, and beauty can be complicated. We are equally called, whether there are only a few in the pews, or our pews are full, to join the Seraphim and Cherubim crying with the best of our being, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts.’ We cannot say these words carelessly or half-heartedly. We go to church to learn to cry out holy in harmony with the heavenly hosts.
The Church who is not grappling with the strange complexity of Scripture, who is not attempting to understand the love of the Triune God, and a church without its roots in the doctrine of the Incarnation and the person of Jesus Christ, cannot weigh a soul toward love. Love is fed by understanding; it is hard to love that which we do not know. We love the one we can encounter. And the love of the Trinity is revealed in the person, work, death, and resurrection of Christ. He is our place of encounter. Christ is available to us as word and as sacrament. We are drawn into the life of God, into the body of Christ, by participating in word and sacrament. We go to church to encounter Christ.
“I am carried by it wherever I am carried.”
We go to church to be carried. We need to be carried. Where one is weak, the other is strong. Where one is believing, the other is doubting. We hold each other up. We are not going to church just to have a good chit chat (though this is part of love), we are going to church to be carried by each other in God to God. Charles Williams says that when an infant is baptized into the church, that baby is being placed into a coinherence — a reality in which we all are attached to one another, in which we depend on one another, by which we are all saved together.² In this reality, we are all sustained by the one who holds us all, the God-Man Jesus Christ. Our lives together are hidden in Christ in God and carried into life. Our job is to get to church, to come into the circle of transcendent love with other people. From there, the transcendent takes over and picks us up and carries us. We are carried together, because we carry each other.
“Through your gift we catch fire and are carried upward; we go up in flames, and up we go.”
We go to church to be exposed to the fire which emancipates upward movement. We go to church to confess our sins. The fire of God’s love is good and freeing, but it is neither safe nor tame. Being in church can make us uncomfortably warm. Jesus says, “The Truth will set you free,”³ but the truth is not always easy. By our confession, we bring those things that we want to hide, the issues we don’t want to talk about, the shame we might feel, and we place them by the great fire. We want to feel clean, forgiven, hopeful, and free, and this means that some things will need to burn away. This hurts, but we know that in order to be the people we long to be, we need to catch fire. We go to church to catch fire — to be forgiven for our sin and to be sanctified.
“In our heart we ascend the ascending staircase, and we sing the song of the rising steps.”
As we come to the fire of confession we need courage. In the fiery furnace, it is best, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to sing.4 We go to church to sing. We sing with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, and as I said earlier, this beauty, this singing, moves us; it gives us courage and strength. Worship in song also teaches us truth in our bodies; we learn to breathe when we sing, and breath is related to the life of the Spirit. We also learn with our bodies what it feels like to be in tune and out of tune. Singing changes what we know and how we know it. The former Archbishop Rowan Williams, in a lecture on singing in the church, said, “[I]t is that fundamental principle of ‘word made flesh’ that is perhaps the best theological justification for singing rather than just saying. Because singing is part of our fleshliness. And one of the ways in which our flesh becomes meaningful and beautiful…[H]ymns are never just decorations. Singing is not an afterthought in Christian action and worship.”5 We go to church to sing our faith, attuning ourselves to others and to God.
“By your fire, by your good fire, we go up in flames, and there we go, since we go up to the peace of Jerusalem; since I rejoice in those who said to me, ‘We will go to the Master’s house.’ Good will is going to set us in the right place there, in such a way that our will is for nothing but to remain there for eternity.”6
We go to church to find peace and rest — to find our place and make our home.7 We humans desperately want to know our purpose, our place in the world, and we want to have a home. We learn our place, our home, by moving our bodies to a particular God-filled place on a regular basis. By being fed with the bread of angels in the Eucharist, we learn to feast together. By carrying each other, we learn charity and coinherence. By standing close to the fire in our confession, we learn to be real. By singing praise together, we learn harmony. All of these actions give us a taste of eternity; we experience it and we learn to know it together. We go to church to prepare for our true home.
I hope that with all this poetic language, emotion, and singing, that this answer is also down to earth and practical. “My love is my weight.” We go to church to honour the laws of gravity in our lives.
- Augustine, Confessions. trans. Sarah Ruden (The Modern Library, 2017), book 13.10, 436-437
- Charles Williams, Descent of the Dove (Eerdmans Printing Company, 1939), 235.
- John 8:32
- The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is found in Daniel 3. Their song is found in the apocryphal text The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three and is a canticle in the Book of Common Prayer.
- Rowan Williams, “Treasure no. 72: What we are saying by singing”, The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, https://hymnsocietygbi.org.uk/ 2006/10/treasure-no-72-what-are-we-saying-by-singing/.
- Augustine, Confessions, book 13.10, 437
- This phrase comes from Julian of Norwich. “He wants us to have true knowledge that he himself is being; and he wants our understanding to be founded in this knowledge with all our might, and all our purpose, and all our intention; and upon this foundation he wants us to take our place and make our home.” Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Barry Windeatt (Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), section 42.94.
