December musings: Love

I often wonder what on earth can solve these spaces between us, and the way we see and don’t see each other. The way we barely skim the surface. In marriage, in life, glances from people just passing by, the best intentions of our friends. We can never truly know each other.

Money and goals and lists of things to do. Is this really what we’re made of? 

Oh, but in the advent, I am changed by hope. Lately hope has been a rare treasure. I reach for it in the mornings and find that I’ve misplaced it. But the object of my hope lives outside of me and beyond me. He is so much bigger than me, his breath creates stars, and he is not dependant on me for my consistency, thank the skies. 

I am as flimsy as a piece of paper. Oh, it is so good that the world is not mine to save.

So what can move in the gaping spaces? This is my big question on this retreat, as I move between what I aim to do and what I actually do, what I hope to understand and what I actually comprehend. What my life shape is, compared to the pictures of life around the world, the way the loudness of it all seems to silence me.

It can only be love. Love will change the way I see the story of my life. Love will expand each day into something more mysterious than failed goals, will breathe on me with holy breath that expands and sustains. My failures can be as huge as the failure to control my tongue or as small as an unreturned email, but love flies in with a cape and soothes the ache.

And it soothes it enough that I might actually begin to embrace failure, might believe that it is a result of risks taken, all our attempts at the large work of love in the universe. Failure is not the same as sin, but my mind says it is. 

Right now I do not embrace it. All my work is done with gritted teeth against its possibility. I think I embrace brokenness but truly do not. I embrace the romantic idea of brokenness but not the crying into the pillow. I think I would much prefer perfection, a smooth sky of unending blue. Trees are easier to be around than people because relating is so hard, but people are the landscape of love, the moving fabric of this whole long story of redemption. Love comes with a cup of honey, a soft song, and whispers that we are truly known, even when the spaces between us feel like the emptiness between planets. This act of love, the impending incarnation, is love taking an immense leap from far away and landing with all the gentleness of a small bird.

Oh Holy Night. Come to us again. Bring love, bring love. 

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