Lenten Choices: Deep and Wide

I'm referring to the song I learned in Sunday School back in the 1960s in Anderson, SC.  God's love is big, I can swim in it!   I never once considered that that depth and width was meant for anything other than my pleasure, my immersion.  That is to say that the piety I was taught was built on personal salvation, on becoming singularly sufficient either by conversion or submission, me and Jesus.

It took teen-aged frustration and well-worn parents to find any purchase, any traction in a world that understood justice as salvation, that understood God's love as for saving the world and not just building an army of Baptists.

When I last sang this refrain it was not about me as the one bathing in God's fountain but me as one of many striving for peace and prosperity among all people.  It was in the 1980s in an inter-denominational and racially mixed meeting gathered to pray and imagine how best to support the work of a homeless shelter.

This was yet another chapter in my life of learning and unlearning, of framing and changing frames, of doubt and repentance.  But consider that even without competitive Southern Baptist upbringings or bleeding heart liberalism we can each remember envisioning a world smaller than the one we now understand as seen and loved by God.

Each one of us can grow, each one of us has grown, each one of us has a way of understanding that is larger than the one we had before.  Some of that comes by repentance, some of that is natural human development and personal individuation, some of it is only by way of a deep spiritual maturity.

This song has meant so many things to me and now it means the possibility for spiritual depth that comes from God but only continues when there is an accompanying redistribution of that love. 
It's deep AND wide, not the either/or of my earlier understanding.  It's not just my salvation and it doesn't forget that I need saving, too.  It's not just feeding the hungry and it doesn't ignore my own deficiencies and weakness.

The fountain of God's saving love is for me because it is for everyone.  The fountain of God's love is deep because of who God is.  It can be deep in each one of us because God's love goes that deep.  The fountain of God's saving love is wide because of who we are.  It can be wide because every human, even the ones with more to learn, has some of that love to share.