[The following meditation was based on the hymn, “My Song is Love Unknown” (Hymn 343 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship). It was published in 2013 Lenten Devotions by the East Kentucky Conference of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.]
“My song is love unknown.” Love doesn’t have to be acknowledged to be real, to be powerful, to do its work. God loved the world into existence and has been loving the world into redemption ever since, whether we know it or not.
“My song is love unknown.” Love doesn’t have to be understood to be real, to be powerful, to do its work. God’s world-making, world-redeeming love operates in us, around us, and through us, even when we are most unloving and unlovable.
“My song is love unknown.” This love is the deep magic to which C.S. Lewis refers in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the inexplicable and relentless Love that continually remakes us and the entire world in its own image.
It is often unknown because it works in ways that we do not always recognize or understand, but it is not unknowable. We experience it in the filigree of miracles that sustains life. We encounter it in the daily grace of living with other beings. It is manifest in the Christ, the One who died and was raised, the One we see in the faces of enemies and strangers as well as family and friends.
O Love unknown, help us remember that you are always at work, even in the least likely places. Stir up in us a desire to know you, to seek you in the unfamiliar and the perplexing. In the name of Jesus, who gave himself in love to redeem the world. Amen.
The Daily Compost 