Restorative Love

In the last week of July, I was able to retreat with the Bose Community in Italy for their annual Ecumenical week. Surrounded by people from different backgrounds and traditions, working together to plant, harvest and even bake, I experienced a glimpse of what the Kingdom of God might look like, what humanity at its best can look like. Returning home, however, that sense of hope was confronted by the relentless news cycle and the controversy surrounding the late Professor Jason Arday. Reading the racism, vitriol and public dissection of his life, I felt I had moved from seeing the best of humanity to witnessing the worst. It forced me to ask: What does love really mean when it is tested?

Paul in Colossians invites us to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, and then challenges us to ‘bear with each other and forgive one another’. Love is not simply an emotion, or something offered when it is reciprocated. Its true depth is revealed when someone disappoints, fails or hurts us.

We have become experts in what Rowan Williams calls ‘rituals of humiliation’, but we lack rituals of restoration. Our culture can expose and condemn someone within hours yet struggles to imagine what comes next: a pathway towards accountability, healing and renewed belonging. Justice and grace should not be enemies.

Christ thankfully offers us a radically different vision. Scripture is filled with flawed people, whose failures were neither ignored nor used to erase their humanity. They were confronted with truth and restored. Perhaps the greatest challenge is recognising ourselves in those who fail. We are all imperfect, all learning how to be human, and all dependent upon grace.

Jason Arday once said, ‘I would take a thread and a needle, and I’d interweave love into our society’. That work is fragile and difficult. It requires resisting condemnation and creating communities where people can be held accountable yet still held within love.

May we put down the stones of humiliation, pick up the thread and needle, and learn to love not when people are impressive, but when they are most in need of grace.

Maddie Naisbitt