Slow Love.

By Trish Patrick in All Sorts

taking the time to acknowledge people, place, and process, not just in the spiritual world but in the world of commerce, trade, sport, community, and health where the sacred is expressed through our everyday lives and activities. We live in community and are instructed to 'love our neighbour as ourselves' . This takes time, energy and resources.....it is slow love.

One of our Lenten Studies this year talked about 'slow love', an idea which concentrated my thinking around what 'slow love' might look like. Can one do 'fast love' and what would that look like.
David drew our attention to a Japanese Theologian, Kosuke Koyame who, in his book entitled ' The Three Mile an Hour God ' suggests the average human walking speed is 3 miles per hour....'Jesus walked the land at 3 miles per hour.
Love has a speed, it is slow.....it is a spiritual speed.'
It occurred to me that Maori Culture is an excellent example of slow love. Their tradition of Karakia, welcoming ceremony, funeral processes, debating and consultation, being respectful of time and place, taking the time to remember ancestors and events, to mention a few, are all examples of slow love. It cannot be ignored or rushed. It is central to who they are and their way of being in the world.
This is the antithesis of the western way of being in the world where 'time is money', the faster life is, the more wealth can be created. In other words, time is a commodity to be bought and sold.
In the western model, temporal life is kept separate from spiritual life... rarely do they intersect.
Living life in the fast lane is something to be admired and nurtured. Public holidays, annual leave, sick leave, bereavement leave, tend to be perceived by the corporate world as necessary evils to be minimised and closely monitored to ensure productivity and consequent wealth is maximised to keep the share holders and investors happy. It is mainly thanks to the workers and the Trade Unions that we have compulsory annual leave and other entitlements enshrined in law. Christmas, Easter, ANZAC Day, Waitangi day, and provincial anniversary days continue... but for how long? I wonder.
Obviously, in our hyper-capitalist western world, we need large corporates and smaller businesses to produce goods, employ people, and generally keep our civilization going. However, is the way we are going about it sustainable for humanity, animal and plant life, and the planet?
One of the enormous costs of this life style is that people have become 'time poor'. Time has become a commodity along with people, who are put out of work in favour of technology.
Instead of having a person in the office fielding phone calls and being generally helpful, now one must ' jump on line' and answer a list of questions which you probably don't want the answers to.
What you want to know remains unknown because there is no one to tell you.
Human contact is increasingly being seen as time consuming and undesirable possibly because humans have an inconvenient penchant for asking questions other humans don't want to answer.
But look at the time saving and economic gains of such a system!
Really!!??
As we have just established, our lives as we live them today and 'slow love' seem barely compatible.
Yet, I would suggest we are the more impoverished if we disregard it out of hand as impossible to attain.
I'm not suggesting we walk everywhere at three miles an hour, or revert to living in slow motion. Love is manifest in many ways. One such manifestation is taking the time to acknowledge people, place, and process, not just in the spiritual world but in the world of commerce, trade, sport, community, and health where the sacred is expressed through our everyday lives and activities. The sacred is inseparable from this. Perhaps time is the liminal space between the two, with language and ritual a way of expressing these realities.
Maori and other indigenous peoples have been modeling this way of being in the world for centuries.
The western way of life struggles to embrace these values as the 'time is money ' concept pervades all aspects of life.
Jesus practised slow love as he moved among people, the ordinary peasants who were labouring to eke out a living under the domination of Rome who had imposed many taxes and restrictions on individuals and communities. He spoke truth to power whenever the situation demanded. Love demands that. Slow love demands that WE persist in speaking truth to power. Jesus had a way of upending the current social norms to ensure the poor and vulnerable were seen, heard and provided for in a manner that conserved their dignity... it wasn't just lip service. We live in community and are instructed to 'love our neighbour as ourselves' . This takes time, energy and resources.....it is slow love. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Shirley Murray expresses it well...

Those without status, treated as nothing,
you have made royal, gifted with rights,
chosen as partners, midwives of justice,
birthing new systems, lighting new lights.

Not by your finger, not by your anger
will our world order change in a day,
but by your people, fearless and faithful,
small paper lanterns, lighting the way.

Trish Patrick