Around the time Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God was published, a slim book of pastoral and constructive theology was published, with the telling title, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Some of Moltmann's most adventurous insights into the suffering love of God were given pastoral purchase in this slim volume.
Canon William Hubert Vanstone (whose contribution to church economic theory was to sell the antique vicarage furniture to pay for the repair of the church roof!) fulfilled a long ministry in Kirkholt (near Rochdale) until ill health forced him into retirement. He wrote Love's Endeavour as a reflection on those years of ministry in a commuter estate in the late fifties until the mid-seventies. It's the story of his search for a theology that would sustain the church in its mission, and himself in his vocation, in a world where God and church seemed hardly relevant.
He wrote of the precariousness of love, insisting that love can have no guaranteed outcome, and that the love of God is expressed precisely in this risk-filled vulnerability of self-giving – love is cruciform, and the cross is divine love personified, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense.
Vanstone wrote and lived out a courageous and risk-filled theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom. Love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love.The idea of an all-powerful love requires, therefore, careful qualification.
The power of God’s love is not coercive, but seeks the response of those so loved. The power of God’s love is not overwhelming force but inexhaustible mercy. The power of God’s love is exerted in patient persuasion, faithful persistence, forgiveness of wrong, and the freely borne cost of loving those who are undeserving, who are hard work, and who may even reject the gift of self that is the ultimate proof of love in its purest form. Divine love is indefatigable in imaginative creativity, uncalculating in generous openness to the one loved, so that what is suffered is borne because the one who is loved is worth it.
Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, and its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God, remains for me one of the most influential and theologically decisive books I have ever read. I genuinely treasure my now yellowing £2.95 copy of a book that has shaped and liberated many a pastor, minister, or priest engaged in the search for a pastoral theology of the love of God that takes seriously the suffering, struggles, mistakes, sins, uncertainties and anxieties and all the experienced finitudes of human life.
In daring, passionate prose, Vanstone provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about what love is and what love must be if it reflects the love of God; precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, costly in investment, risk-filled, self-donating, no guaranteed outcome, faithful waiting which is patient of purpose. Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky. The words are set out below.
But before that, two testimonies from people who knew W H Vanstone as their priest. Years ago I wrote a couple of things about Vanstone, and had correspondence from several people who knew him well. One was a child during Vanstone’s ministry:
"My childhood memories of Mr Vanstone are magical. I was born on Kirkholt in 1957 and lived next door to the church, St Thomas. He brought all the community together what with the gang shows, cleaning his coverage (paving slabs) when we were small children for some plums, and listening to his ghost stories. I remember one especially about a dog with a man's face! We had brilliant times going Carol singing each Christmas with Mr Vanstone, singing in the stairwells of flats and always finishing up at Mrs Morgan's house for supper. Best memories of a lovely, down to earth, community gentleman. What fantastic work he did."
Then there is this brilliant character reference from one of his curates in the early 1970’s:
“I was Bill's curate in Kirkholt from 1971-74. He used to bin all his parish sermons after use. To this day, I wish I had raided the bins on Monday morning. I could have had a treasury of spiritual insight and learning.”
At the end of Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, Vanstone included a hymn which is the strong concentrate of his profound and personal theological narrative of the love of God for this wayward and recalcitrant universe, for this heartache of an earth, and for each being created by him, especially those made in God’s image.
Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;
Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;
Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.
Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.
Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.
Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.
Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.
– Canon William (Bill) Hubert Vanstone
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