Christmas to Epiphany VII: Pazienza de Dio (The Patience of God)

The Road (Oh, Hell!) of Good Intentions

On this sixth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

It’s New Year’s Eve morning as I write.  Tonight my wife and I will go to the traditional New Year’s Eve party at the home of some friends.  Having already eaten too much over Christmas, we will eat too much more.  There will be those among the large gathering, I suspect, who will drink too much, too.  But this excess is very, very good, because it takes us right down the entrance ramp to the American tradition of New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s an enormous highway, a dozen lanes filled bumper-to-bumper…for a few days.  Traffic thins out pretty quickly, and pretty soon lanes merge and then merge again and by the end of the year, the road to good intentions has narrowed to a lightly traveled footpath.

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

The patience of God,

the closeness of God,

the tenderness of God.

As mentioned in yesterday’s posting, Pope Francis gave us a tricycle to ride, stable and certain transportation.  And how perfect that the first of the three characteristics to which he called us this Christmas season is patience.  It is good, as well, that he calls us not merely to patience, but to the patience of God. 

Our own patience is inadequate.  At an Alanon meeting a few years ago, someone shared a maxim that has stuck with me: expectations are premeditated resentments.  He was speaking of our expectations of others, but I believe that the statement is equally true of our expectations of ourselves.  Remember Francis’s essential premise, that the central meaning of Christmas is not our call to love God, but to accept our smallness and let God love us!

Yesterday morning I had coffee with two close friends, and our conversation began with a query about…New Year’s Resolutions.  A blessing of our threesome is our spectrum of preference and style on many things, even as we share the same values.  The spectrum shown in a rainbow draws us to look at something ordinary – light – opened to expose for a moment its mystery and beauty.  Here are some statements that opened us to a colorful and stimulating conversation about intentions and hopes. As we respect and appreciate each other, we spent some time looking at New Year’s Resolutions from each other’s perspectives.

What do I stand for every day?  What do I stand for any day?  One was inclined to desire consistency and continuity in his life, persistently caring about certain issues or values.  The other was inclined to wake up each day and be present to the specific experiences or awarenesses that emerged that day.  Mission and Mindfulness.

Don’t “should” on me.  I’ve already should on myself.  He might as well have said “’should’ is shit!”  For years I’ve tried to discourage my wife from saying we should do something when what she means is that she’d enjoy us doing something.  But “we should” and “we’ve got to” remains a common phrase.  But when my friend shared this phrase, I realized that the reason that I’m so sensitive to my wife (or anyone else) putting a demand on me is that I’ve already put too many demands on myself.

More – Enough: In our threesome, one of us was quite inclined (driven?) to want to do more, while another was quite content with the desire to reflect on the sense that he has, is, and does enough. 

And this last statement calls me to close.  Among Jesuit-formed people, a name for God is “Magis” – the more. This Jesuit-formed Pope and our Jesuit-formed martyr Fr. Delp call us to know that it is God who is enough.  It is God who calls us to “Basta” – Enough!  We are not called to be Magis; that’s God’s work.  We are called to allow God to love us, and that, sweet Jesus, is enough!

I believe that God calls me not to the ten-lane expressway of New Year’s Resolutions but to walk with Him on the narrow daily path, to experience God’s patient love. 

Should I resolve to take God up on that?  It would, I’m certain, be enough.

Tomorrow – the closeness of God

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Christmas to Epiphany VI: Becoming the Words

Before watching Pope Francis celebrate Midnight Mass, there were two times when I recall understanding a foreign speaker without knowing his language.  Francis was the third.

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

On this sixth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

  

The first was an Italian, like Francis.  Velio was describing to us the work in his alabaster studio in Volterra, where our students spent their summer.  His whole body spoke, and his old eyes gave off a light that made his words clear.  

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying.  

The second was a priest, like Francis.  In a side chapel that provided intimacy in the cavernous Frankfurt Cathedral, the celebrant’s homily was about the Good Shepherd. 

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying. 

“The Word of God”; that is what John calls Jesus in the first chapter of his Gospel.  There was a point at which Francis illuminated that name without speaking it.  Francis read from his text with bodily gesture and eye contact, tempo and inflection, making the words come to life.  But at one point his eyes paused on the congregation, and he looked intently at them, breaking the cadence of his presentation.  And his words that were born in that silent pause “became flesh.”

Pazienza di Dio,

vicinanza di Dio,

tenerezza di Dio.

The patience of God,

the closeness of God,

the tenderness of God.

Francis became the words – patient, close, and tender with us. 

He became his words, and to see him was to know what he was saying.  

What difference did it make to Pope Francis that Jesus was born?  He was changed by the experience enough to become the words of truth that emerged from his soul, filled to overflowing with awareness of God.

Incarnation.  Words becoming flesh.  Velio, the German priest, and Francis call me to the almost irresistible beauty of this incarnation.  Almost.  I will need a lot of grace to pull it off myself, to be the words I’m given, to change into God’s patience, and closeness, and tenderness.

Over the next three days we’ll spend time reflecting and praying with those three words.

Meanwhile, here is a link to Francis’s Midnight Mass homily…inEnglish.

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Christmas to Epiphany V: Simeon’s Certainty

"Now you let your servant go in peace." 

Simeon knew.  

He was certain.

On this fifth day of Christmas, we continue to reflect on Fr. Alfred Delp’s question, what difference it makes in our lives that Christ is born.

Yesterday at breakfast, two of our adult children (in their 40’s) were sharing about their visits to church on Christmas.  Both enter church as outsiders, grateful for the way we raised them but not “practicing Catholics”.  That we could have a conversation about their experience was a gift to us.  They noticed things, about the way the priest said and did things.  These ways of expressing the priest’s own faith evokes a sense of the holy in themselves.  They mentioned, too, their sense of freedom to enter, to observe, and not be bound or forced.  And finally they shared that it was interesting to hear the congregation mumble together the Creed.  While the celebrant’s pace and tone and inflection at the Consecration made it apparent that this was a very holy moment, the droning of the Creed seemed to bring into question the reality of their belief.  It seemed merely words.  They agreed with my invitation that they consider the tonal character of Buddhist chants that they have both experienced.

The point was clear.  The reciting of the Creed was hardly convincing.  And that is why Simeon’s certainty meant so much to me.  “Listen” to these words of his as he sees Jesus in the temple where he has served for many years:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.  This man was righteous and devout, awaiting the consolation of Israel,* and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Messiah of the Lord.

He came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform the custom of the law in regard to him,

He took him into his arms and blessed God, saying:

“Now, Master, you may let your servant go

in peace, according to your word,

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you prepared in sight of all the peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles,

and glory for your people Israel.”

The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;

and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted

(and you yourself a sword will pierce)* so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Simeon's certainty brings him peace.  I often suffer indecision which I believe is based on self-doubt.  Fr. Ron Rolheiser wrote of John the Baptist that as he was asked, “Who are you?” he could answer clearly; he knew who he was because he knew who Jesus was.

Like John, Simeon spoke clearly and decisively; one might say prophetically.  I consider again my children’s observations while “visiting” Mass.  The words of the priest were to them more like Simeon, proclamations of their truth.  Prophetic.  Perhaps my own indecisiveness and self-doubt are more like the droning of the congregation reciting the Creed.  More pathetic than prophetic.

What difference does it mean to me that Jesus was born?  I want to be more like Simeon. I want, in believing in Jesus, to allow myself to be loved (as the Pope pleaded in his Christmas homily), and to believe in myself.  I want to know with Simeon’s certainty who I am because I know who Jesus is.  And that means that my self-knowledge is inextricably intertwined in my coming to know Jesus.

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Christmas to Epiphany IV: “God is in love with our smallness”

"Do I allow myself to be taken up by God, to be embraced by him, or do I prevent him from drawing close?" 

Pope Francis asked this in his Midnight Mass homily. "'But I am searching for the Lord' – we could respond. Nevertheless, what is most important is not seeking him, but rather allowing him to find me and caress me with tenderness. The question put to us simply by the Infant’s presence is: do I allow God to love me?”

We look again at Fr. Alfred Delp S.J.’s ultimate question in light of the Christmas event: What difference does it make to me?

Five years ago I was given medical news that made me aware that I could die at any moment. It is the reason I began this blog, and whence its title.  I thought that I’d been given lemons. Everything changed because I saw death for the first time as real and present.  I acted more lovingly and caringly toward my wife.  I didn’t sweat things. I delighted in the present, and was continuously grateful for the past.  My life changed.  But I must confess that my life has mostly changed back.  

What difference does it make to me that I felt death near? I’m ashamed to say, not enough.  I too often fail to delight in things, including my life companion.  A worry about the future, and that worry robs me of the present.  But most of all, I allow my sense of inadequacy to distract me from everything. 

So the Pope’s question, and Delp's rings familiar; it stops me and turns me around.  God is actually in love with the thing about myself that I most reject – my smallness.  Did I earn enough money in my lifetime to enjoy growing old with my wife?  Can I drop my fears about the good that I can do with others based on my reluctance to accept myself, flaws and all?  Can I enjoy the company of others undistracted by my thoughts that I don’t matter to them?

So as we contemplate the Christmas event, as we sit before the image of the manger scene, perhaps you will join me in allowing the story to take me in.  Allow yourself to be lifted up into the story with me.  Will we find ourselves as the babe, feeling the warmth of Mary?  Will we be Mary, or Joseph, or a shepherd, or a sheep? 

Contemplative prayer, like life in the love of God, is something that the Pope reminds us is not doing something, but accepting something.  Being drawn into the presence of God, or for that matter, God in the present, is a gift.  It is a gift already given. It is offered every moment. 

Pope Francis’s question is Delp’s.  Will I let God love me, and experience my life changing?  Will you?

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From Christmas to Epiphany III: He's YOURS!

This is the third day of the “12 Days of Christmas” leading to the Epiphany.  In 1944, Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J. was writing in his cell in Tegel Prison, writing to us the faithful about Christmas, and our response to the encounter.  His last writing would be about Epiphany, which means “opening”.  It would for him be the opening into the afterlife.  He would be hanged by the Nazis the day after Epiphany.

How would we respond to the encounter of the Nativity if we were actually there? 

Years ago in a prayer and study group at Manresa Jesuit RetreatHouse near Detroit, a woman sat in prayer for days following Christmas, and shared the following story. 

"I had imagined my way to the manger lighted by the star.  The path through the arid vegetation was well worn, and my feet could feel the little stones through my sandals.  The path itself seemed to draw me, giving me a sense of what “forward” was.  I was in kind of a fog of this feeling of the power of the path when I realized that I had come upon the manger.  It was just a rough structure, just enough to hold up a roof, a kind of alcove into which animals could…"

"...As I was looking at the baby, my eyes drawn to the swaddling, and the way it embraced and comforted him, Mary gently lifted him…and held him out to me!"

" 'Take him; he’s yours,' she said!" 

The woman began to weep now, as she had wept there in prayer.  Her vivid description of the experience had brought us along, and as she was drawn into this unexpected gesture of Mary, we were too.

What about you?  Here is Mary, holding out Jesus to you.  She is telling you that he is yours.  She is waiting for your response.  How will you respond?  This is what Fr. Delp is asking us.  He challenges us not to make in our minds kitschy nativity scenes with a cute little baby Jesus and a sweet little family of three, with ox and ass and drummer boy. He challenges us not to walk away from the manger.  He asks us what difference it makes to us that Jesus was God taking our flesh.

When I revisit the woman’s experience, and I find Mary holding out the baby to me, I recall that my tears on her telling were awe and gratitude and honor.  That she would give me her precious child!  But this year as I went back to that moment, I took the baby to my breast in embrace, and felt him rooting at my breast for food.  I felt embarrassed and then inadequate.  I recalled having held one of my newborn daughters that way, and can still physically recall the feeling of their rooting, their tiny mouth searching intently.  I had looked with humor and confusion at my wife, and can hear her saying, “Hold her in your arms, but not against your chest.”

And I remembered that my cute little baby daughter…needed…to…be…fed!

To accept Jesus into our life is to care for Him.  The God who is born to us is really human, really flesh.  The incarnation means this.  God made man is a God who needs us to respond, not just watch, or pray, or even adore. 

I think now as I write how this unspeaking newborn infant and His calling me to responsibility brings to mind the Gospel of a few weeks ago, calling us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked….

Christmas calls us to incarnation as well, to know that we are flesh, that our faith is faith-in-the-flesh, just as this baby that Mary is holding out to us as our own needs to be FED!

Perhaps you will find some light in sitting with this story, sitting with Mary holding the baby out to you. For some tips on Ignatian contemplation, praying by entering the story, click here.

Tomorrow: The Pope’s “piccolezza”

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From Christmas to Epiphany II: From the Pieta to the Manger to the Pieta

Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s.  Our sweet human new Pope cradles the “Gesu Bambino” in his arms, walking with his wobbling gait to the recessional hymn of the same name.  In front of him are eight young children, just waist-high to him, in brightly colored clothes of their various cultures.  At the elaborate Manger scene, Francis places the baby Jesus in the manger, blesses and thanks the little children one by one, even giving one of them a zucchetto (the papal skullcap) that he had momentarily placed on his own head, in a smiling, mute blessing.   

Was it merely coincidence that Pope Francis and the procession to the altar for Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s passed the Pieta on the way, and again at the end of Mass, the recessional, “Gesu Bambino” with full choir, orchestra and organ vibrating the incense-smoky air?  Here the stiff plaster Gesu Bambino in the soft arms of the smiling old Shepherd of Rome and there in Ferrara marble the flaccid corpse of the King of Heaven in the arms of his grieving Mother….

Yesterday we considered the caveat from Fr. Delp in Nazi prison on the eve of Christmas 1944, on the way to the Nazi gallows himself the day after Epiphany.  Fr. Delp warned us: “One must take care to celebrate Christmas with a great realism.  Otherwise, the emotions expect transformations the intellect cannot substantiate.  Then the outcome of this most comforting of all holidays can be a bitter disappointment and paralyzing weariness….”

For me, validity of the symbol of the journey to the Manger by way of the Pieta was reinforced on the recessional, the strains of the sweet Gesu Bambino hymn still reverberating in Brunelleschi’s grand dome in clear D major, but bent to an ominous minor key in passing the Pieta a second time.

The reality is that the story of salvation is not accomplished at Christmas; the stage is merely set.  Delp’s warning is that we look at the baby in the manger not merely with emotions that warm our hearts with joy, but with our intellect as well, that notices once, then twice that the joyful throng passes by the Pieta once, and then twice.

We are called not to joy but through joy, transformed to hope that just as the story does not end at the manger, it does not end at the cross.

Tomorrow:  It’s a boy; He’s YOURS.

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From Christmas to Epiphany I: Baby Jesus? Le's Get Real!

A gift of this Advent has been the writings of Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J. from his cell in Tegel, the Nazi prison in which he was hanged the day after Epiphany, 1945.  In gratitude for the gift of this experience, I aim to write on each of these “12 Days of Christmas” between the Nativity and Epiphany.  And I am writing to force myself (and encourage you) to process the challenge that he gives us as his parting gift in a question:  What difference does it make to us really, that Christ is born?

Satisfied or Searching?

Today on Christmas I begin with his caution that we not simply walk away from the Nativity Scene satisfied, but rather searching.

Fr. Delp meditated on the Christmas Vigil 1944, writing:

“One must take care to celebrate Christmas with a great realism.  Otherwise, the emotions expect transformations the intellect cannot substantiate.  Then the outcome of this most comforting of all holidays can be a bitter disappointment and paralyzing weariness….”

As he struggles every day to rise above his own human condition (Germany being bombed by the Allies, the Catholic Church having capitulated to Hitler, and most immediately his imminent execution) he continues:  

“Oh, you need to have counted the hours until your next piece of bread in order to know what this means, and what tension is involved in rising above the human condition.”

He goes on to explain, 

“Eliminating the tension…may have seemed like a relief at first, like liberation from an uncomfortable burden. Yet over time, one cannot avoid recognizing that these burdens are among the fixed conditions and prerequisites of life.”

“Tension” is the term that Delp used in the temporal/eternal relationship within each of us.  When Mary answered “yes” to the angel, she relieved this tension, and within her grew the God/man who could die/rise and save us from…what?

So here our soon-to-be-murdered young Jesuit warns us not to avoid the tension that is real, remains real, between the promise of our own salvation and the work of participating in the salvation of others.  We searched for the Manger, after waiting for The One.  He calls to us: “The God whose coming we celebrate remains the God of promise!”

We are not finished with the gift of Christmas.  We have simply come to encounter The Way.  

Our search for Christ continues; it is a search for justice.  As Delp experienced true hunger, he experienced more acutely the meaning of our call – to “hunger and thirst for justice.”

Tomorrow: Papal Midnight Mass: from Pieta to Manger to Pieta.

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The Holy Spirit will come to you, and power of the most high shall overshadow you.

Here in the temperate climate, we may think of shadows as negative – places of threat or sadness.  The root of the word in Latin languages is “somber.”  I grew up with a politically incorrect image of a Mexican man leaning against a wall asleep under his sombrero – which means “something that makes shade”.  Mexico and the location of the Gospel story share a reality different from ours.  Both are hot climates.  Shade is a source of safety from the threat of the burning sun.

In our culture, being “overshadowed” means that something – or someone – is rendered less important than the thing or person overshadowing them.  In our culture, we can miss something beautiful in this line.  The Spirit is not diminishing Mary.  The Spirit is enfolding her in a protecting embrace.  But more.

Albert Delp S.J. speaks of Advent as relieving the “temporal-eternal tension” which we experience as existential longing, an ache that frames our very existence.  The enfolding of the angel (and Mary’s acceptance of it) is the first stage in this process of relieving.  The angel in its immortality (never ending-ness) is a forerunner of the eternity of God (God’s always having been and never ending)   Don’t the wings that we have used to depict the angelic image provide a kind of shawl (see Catherine McAuley’s spiritualityof the shawl, enfolding and including the other) or umbrella or canopy or…sombrero?  The Angel, who cannot embrace (for lack of touch) , can enclose and shelter, without touching, without completely closing the distance (or satisfying the longing).  Perhaps the angel is the promise, the foretaste of the union to come, to come with her “Yes.”

With Mary's “Yes” comes the complete relief of this “temporal-eternal tension” the complete closing of the distance between temporality and eternity, the touch and physical embrace of God.  In that moment of conception, immortality surrounds Mary and Eternity fills Mary.  And in that moment she is the first of us humans who know that truly God is within us and God is all around us.

For much of my life I felt the celebration of my birthday, on this shortest day of the year, to be overshadowed by Christmas. While resentment of God would have been beyond me, I spared no self-pity.  I felt that the proximity of these two annual celebrations made my birthday somehow less.

Fr. Delp, in his "Meditation on the Third Sunday of Advent from Tegel Prison December 1944" (quoted above) continues more deeply into the “temporal-eternal tension” by writing, as if of me (two weeks before his hanging, two years before my birth) “He has fallen into the experience of limitation.  He experiences himself, and the world, and all things, even though the colorful wings of his mind, of his yearnings, press beyond all limits.”

In this Advent Season of expectant waiting, in this season of my life when age bends me more naturally to reflection,  I am grateful to Fr. Delp for this birthday present of turning my eyes from the darkness of the meteorological season to the “colorful wings” of God’s Spirit, and the joy of being overshadowed by God who longs to be one with me, and yet waits for my  “Yes”.

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Light from Darkness

Just as black holes draw everything into themselves, light with the same irresistible nature reaches out to everything.  Light is effusive and generous.

Eleven have died here in Traverse City in 2014, eleven who lived on the streets.  Most of them were addicted to alcohol.  Most of them were people I knew enough to see their faces as I type this.  And I can see in my memory’s eye the way their bodies moved when they were in the well-lit and caring shelter, and the way they moved when they were on the street.  In the dining room of the shelter, they were off the booze and on their meds and they were well fed and warm and clean and groomed. Two specifically come to mind, the two most recently deceased. 

Glenn was perhaps 40, his light complexion and beardless round face almost cherubic.  Quiet in my class at the Inn, and almost as quiet in the conversations we had at dinner, an occasional smile would escape from behind his curtain as a faint, momentary hope would make its quick trip through his resigned mind.  Despair would be too active a word for his emotional character. There was a passivity, a helplessness there.  But at the Inn his face showed these sparks of emotional activity when we’d see each other.  On the street his ruddy complexion increased the boyishness of his face, made it seem even more obscene that he would be on the street, living under bridges or in tents.  But oh, how red his eyes were in his constant intoxication!  Mine watered when I saw his, trying to cool themselves as his seemed so hot.  No sparks on the street.  His mind seemed to have receded into the layers of clothes that kept him from freezing, below the outer grime of his winter coat, beneath the odiferous layers of clothing.  Glenn was struck and killed by an unfortunate motorist into whose path he had stumbled on his way to the rotating shelter in a church in a nearby town.  He didn’t want to be too late to get in.

Don was in his mid-60’s, but looked much older.  He called himself “Hobo Don” because he had been a classical vagabond for most of his life, “riding the rails” in his youth, having fled his abusive home in his teens.  He was a sage, having absorbed bits and volumes of idea along the way.  He was not one to chatter, to violate quiet with useless words.  But how we would enjoy conversation about humanity, about values, about the darkness of the world and the brightness of human promise!  He would tell me his story, and want to hear mine.  He would look me in the eye and connect mind to mind, soul to soul.  His intoxication was as classic as his “hobo” persona.  The first time we had a conversation, he had been lifted out of a snowbank by a mutual friend, and the armless chair there in the back of the local coffee place required him to intentionally balance himself to keep from falling out.  Yet while his body was at its limit with the booze, his mind and spirit seemed in perfect balance.  I told him that he had a gift of intellect and wisdom that his drinking impeded.  He told me stories of the wounds that he suffered in his adolescence, hurt that drinking dulled.  “If I stop drinking, I’ll die”, he said to me.  One evening a few weeks in the rotating shelter in a nearby church hall, I joined him as he stood amid the other street people and those serving them dinner.

“How ya doin’, Don”, I asked.

“I’m having a hard time with judgmentality” he said, with intellectual simplicity and directness. 

“Whose” I asked, thinking that he was upset about others judging him, or perhaps a gulf of estrangement between those served dinner and those serving it.

“Mine” he said, and let his eyes say the rest; no words necessary. 

Don died in the hospital, his heart unable to sustain his body. 

This is my personal darkness - these two and nine others who were in the shelters a year ago who have died on the streets, in the hospital, and even on the toilet, having taken an overdose to end his life after he had caused the death of another to be killed.

But we who believe are called to put on vestments of light, to go into their darkness not to heal, or certainly not to fix, but simply to be with those in the shadows.

Just as black holes draw everything into themselves, light with the same irresistible nature reaches out to everything.  Light is unstoppable.  

The coming of Light into the dark world is what we long for during these darkest of days. 

And carrying of the Light is that to which we are called.

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When am I too lofty to love?  

When am I too lost to love?

 Prepare ye the way! Maybe it’s because I grew up in the 60’s, when change was about being in the streets, moving the “establishment” to get out of the way of justice.  Maybe it’s because I grew up when the Interstate Highway System was being built, running past our ball field, those two-story high earth movers “making the rough places smooth”, moving, moving, moving so much earth. 

Maybe that’s why I've always thought of this Gospel as a call to prepare the way in the world.

But this year it seems obvious to me that I am called to prepare the way in myself.

When am I up so high in my security or comfort that I cannot see the hungry and the poor and the naked and the imprisoned and the sick?  I’d better come down to where Love can move me by being present to other people, and I’d better pull the ladders down with me, so I cannot go up there so easily again.

When am I so low, in a fetal position of despair or self-doubt that I avert my eyes, let my shoulders droop, consider myself useless in the face of the pain of others, so many others or just this one so needy other?  I’d better let Love lift me by looking into the eyes of others, so hope and self-respect can rise in me, raising me up and in-spiring me, breathing life into me.

 While love never fails, love never forces.  Our God created us free, and the choice to come down from comfort or up from the despair is ours. 

Thanks to EclecticThinktank and FishingForArchitecture for images.
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Love is the Subject, not "I".

 This morning I awoke in a minor key.  Last night we learned that the daughter of a lifelong friend gave birth to her first son three months prematurely, and we fell asleep feeling sad and helpless.  In the past week I had learned of two more homeless acquaintances who died tragically, lengthening the string of beads that I powerlessly pass through my fingers.

I was feeling the failure of my ability to love.

In verse 1 of chapter 13 of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul begins with “I” as the subject.  “If I should speak of tongues of angels….”  The next two verses, similarly, begin “if I…, If I….” And they end in failure.  Starting with verse 4, “I” am not the subject.  Love is the subject.  Love does the action, and not me.  And it is love that is patient, and kind, and so on.  It is love that never fails, and not me.

Love as a verb: good luck!

Perhaps because Paul begins with himself as the subject of the first three verses, I have always thought of this chapter on love as a call to perfect my love, a call to love perfectly.  Of course, when it comes to perfection, not only do I stink at it, but I keep aiming at it.  Icarus, moth-to-flame, red herring, I am drawn and distracted.  It’s all about me, and discouragement inevitably follows.

Love as a noun: a call to witness.

But the subject of this message is love.  Love is the actor.  We are present to the act of love, witnessing it as we do the sunrise.  We do not make the sun rise, and we do not love.  We would be foolish to try to raise the sun, and equally foolish to try to love. 

In an act of love, love emerges from our presence with (not to, because it is mutual) the one who is the object of God’s love. If we are not in a place to see the sunrise, we will not be moved by it.  If we are not in a place to see the other, we will not witness love’s unfailing unfolding.

Some years ago, I crafted a wedding candle for a couple of former students, who had chosen 1 Corinthians 13 as a reading for their wedding.  I pray that they are also discovering love as something to witness responsively, and not merely to attempt.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Lear and the Lessens of Love

A friend, in a heartfelt email, asked “Why do you two have to be so far away?”  I mused that we are better, in a way, at a distance.  At a distance we become our ideal selves.  

We take time to read each other’s words…and never interrupt. We reflect and reply out of the stillness that allows us to sit with their words.  And we incarnate them from their words, seeing their faces as we reply.  With repeated such exchanges over time, we begin to habituate this respectful, reverent exchange.

My friend has lost two husbands and a son, and is leaving to spend time with her daughter whose mortality is brought far too close by a recurring brain tumor. 

Distance of geography, distance in death; we have been reduced to love,  and that blesses us. 

Perhaps grief is the soul’s winnowing, the surface imperfections of those departed – in death or geography – gone on the wind; their essences brought into clearer relief, they can be our truer companions.

Actor Frank Langella spoke of learning from playing King Lear that as things were stripped away, his Lear became “lighter”.  Amid the tragedy of loss, he found Lear – and himself – feeling some relief of the burdens of life at its fullest.  And like Lear was loved by his daughter Cordelia not for his power but for himself, Langella was moved with gratitude for his own daughter, who “from her birth” loved him simply because he was her father.

Langella discovered in playing Lear that letting go was a relief.  In his aging, he began to see the beauty of a process of leaving life with nothing left, embracing this "lessening" as a source of joy.

I pray for that same joy in my friend, that we who are distant feel present with her in our essential goodness and love, as we share this very human process of lessening.