Back in the seventies Simon and Garfunkel sang:

I am a rock; I am an island.

I build walls; a fortress deep inside that none may penetrate.

I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain;

It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.

I am a rock; I am an island.

The song tells the story of a man who isolates himself because he has been hurt in love. When we get hurt we withdraw, we put up barriers against other people so we don’t risk getting hurt again.

The trouble is, when we do that we wither inside. Unless we take the risk of loving and relating to others, we are already as good as dead. As Martin Luther King put it:

"The self cannot be without other selves. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his ethnic origin, or his social position. Human worth lies only in relatedness to one another and relatedness to God."

No man is an island. We are social beings, and that is because we are made in the image of God who is a social being.

The doctrine of the Trinity which we celebrated on Sunday says that God himself is a Communion of Persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit, who exist in a union of eternal love. God is Love, and exists as a relationship of persons in love.

So we must risk loving, however painful it is, because in the end only love will qualify us to be united with the persons of the Trinity. That is what heaven is - and that is what God created us for.

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