Do you love me?

This evening's service at St John's was a meditation on love based on the repeated question of James Baldwin's Ears to hear me:

The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping ...
And during the last set, the saxophone player
took off on a terrific solo.

He was a kid from some insane place like Jersey City
or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had disco-
vered he could say it with a saxophone.

He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling
his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his
twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn,

"Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?"
And again - "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?"
"Do you love me?"

The same phrase unbearably, endlessly, and variously
repeated with all the force the kid had ...
The question was terrible and real.

The kid was blowing with his lungs and guts
out of his short past; and somewhere in the past,
in gutters or gang fights ... in the precinct basement,
he had received a blow from which he would never
recover, and this no one wanted to believe.

Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a
little distance, adding and questioning ... But each man
knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them ...

The reading of this poem followed an instrumental piece played by Floyd, a saxophonist who had travelled from Bexley to be with us for this service. Maddy Channer who led the service spoke about the way in which so many of our actions are a cry for love and linked the poem to the repeated question that Jesus asked Peter as he restored him following his denial.

"Love ... is tried and tested by those nearest to us. True love needs the discipline of demand, the nag of domesticity, and the failings of those dearest to us. This means pain, the pain of growth and perfecting ... The Easter Christ wore the scars of human brutality, for his love had been perfected in the fires of human malice and meanness." (Hugh Lavery)

The service ended with prayers based on 1 Corinthians 13 and another marvellous saxophone solo from Floyd. It was a simple, profound and life-giving, reflective service.

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Albert Ayler - Summertime.