John Wesley Stained Glass
A detail from a stained glass window, "John Wesley preaching in Moorfields in 1738," at St Botolph's in Aldersgate, created by Farrah Bell in 1955. (By Andrewrabbott (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons)
Special to United Methodist Insight
My first "heart-warming" experience was at a United Methodist retreat center (Mount Eagle Retreat Center) when I was still a Baptist fourteen-year-old. I was at the third year of Arkansas Audubon Society Ecology Camps, the "Advanced" crew, journaling and looking at the stars while one of our teachers read aloud the preface to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (an underrated spiritual text): “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
One of my most formative spiritual experiences was at a secular science camp. I remember an overwhelming feeling of awe, peace, comfort, and delight – that the God who somehow made and continuously made the universe delighted in little old me just as God delighted in the Earth –in geese and mountains and big oak trees. Up until then I had something of a persistent anxiety about my salvation, (with a dose of OCD scrupulosity, unfortunately not unknown to many thoughtful evangelical youth). And then suddenly I felt loved and safe and held by the God of the universe. (As it should be.)
I had not been taught how to process such a spiritual experience, so I tucked it into my soul's interior castle, a place for safekeeping, for about two years. That's when I found the Methodists (through the Episcopalians), or they found me. I was mentored by UM and Episcopal clergy and laity throughout high school and eventually joined the United Methodist Church in 2016.
This heart-warming is a moment of gracious resonance that since has been echoed in making membership vows in the United Methodist Church and adopting her baptismal vows for my own, in hearing loud and clear a call to ministry (over and over and over again since about 14 or 15), felt every time in receiving (and now celebrating) the Eucharist, in time spent in prayer on my yoga mat, in watching any wedding or ordination, and in the joy of holding our children and watching them learn to pray and delight in birds and bugs and beautiful things and offer themselves up to comfort a hurting friend with healing touch and tender care.
"Blessed Assurance" is the hymn you think I'd associate with this heart-warming experience, but it's more "It Is Well With My Soul." I didn't really know until this moment on Mount Eagle what it was like to have peace. It is not lost on me that the author both interpreted his spirit's longing and the Spirit's gift of peace and salvation through natural imagery – rivers, seas billowing, clouds – and, how he wrote this hymn in the depths of grief after losing four daughters in a shipwreck and sailing past the site of their deaths to meet his grieving wife.
This is one of the few hymns whose origin story seems to haunt it – to live in it. It is one of my most common lullabies to the girls, yet it can bring me to tears in a heartbeat if I let it. It reminds me of my time in chaplaincy – living with my heart broken wide open – a habit that actually opened the doors to welcoming our own daughters – realizing the preciousness of life and the real important things by sitting at so many deathbeds. It reminds me of what salvation is supposed to feel like. Not like you've dodged some external threat (lookin' at you, fire-and-brimstone preachers), but that whatever threats come your way, you are not alone, you are beheld and seen and beloved and called and that truth, and the separate gift of the awareness of it, makes all the difference.
With that peace, that blessed assurance of your Belovedness – of who you are and whose you are – that peace – you are called to minister to the world (even to all of creation). You pray that all others would know their place in the broke-open heart of God, and be seen and known and loved by the divine in a way that heals and transforms and like a river or a sea, billows out and out and out attending to the way of all.
I hope the salvation I preach, with Christ's saving love and power and grace, brings people to know peace, in step with their vocation, empowered to live boldly in both, walking gently on this Earth in the light of God's face. It's why I'm United Methodist. Why I preach. Why I wear this collar and this robe and dare to stand at the table I've been lent. God's peace, the strange warming of the heart, is not for some, it is for all.
When peace like a river attended my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soul
It is well (it is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul
My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought
My sin, not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh, my soul
It is well (it is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul
And Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll
The trumpet shall sound, and the Lord shall descend
Even so, it is well with my soul
It is well (it is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
Oh, it is well, it is well with my soul
It is well with my soul.
There's another verse that we usually don't sing:
For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pain shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
"Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul..." Happy Aldersgate Day, or rather, Warming of the Heart Day. May God whisper to your soul, too, a warm and enveloping peace that moves you to deeper faith and stronger faithfulness in vocation.
The Rev. Annie Meek
The Rev. Annie McGregor Meek is senior pastor of Community United Methodist Church in Copeville, Texas.