Love v. the Dragon

“I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.”

— “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” by Mandy Len Catron

I don’t know how many of you happened to see this piece from last week’s New York Times about how to fall in love with a stranger (or near-stranger). I was fascinated by it.

Like a lot of people, I have conflicted feelings when it comes to intimacy. I need it and I fear it. I seek it and I turn away from it. I don’t want to be the person who pushes others away… yet something in me demands to be fenced and protected, safe from probing and questions and, yes, the exposure of being too clearly seen.

What is that fear about? It’s shame, right?

I’m pretty sure that when you come right down to it, it’s shame. Primal as my fear of spiders or my love of infants. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know if it’s learned—the result of too many shaming experiences—or something I was born with. It’s just there, something to be worked around. And there have been times in my life, many times, when something has happened and I have found myself engulfed in it—flooded, overwhelmed, blotted out by its life-destroying power.

Those times are fewer and fewer, thank God. Love and prayer have made me so much stronger. The floodwaters of shame, wherever they came from, however they got inside me, are mostly underground, a scalding reservoir deep below, or perhaps a Smaug, a fire-breathing dragon, sleeping beneath the earth.

Falling in love with my husband was the beginning of healing. There were no 36 questions. We didn’t mean to fall in love; in fact, we were trying not to. And perhaps that was part of the power of the experience, that shame had finally met its match, in a love as primal and powerful and irresistible as itself.

There were no 36 questions, no 4-minute timers. But there was a lot of gazing into each other’s faces, with amazement and gratitude.

I can’t count the number of times over the years that my spiritual director has gently asked me whether I am ready to feel GOD’S gaze resting on me, with total adoration and delight.

My response is always the same (with greater or lesser intensity)—where can I hide?

Only lately, two years into my contemplative prayer practice, which is really a practice of allowing God’s healing to enter and penetrate (those words of intimacy!), have I felt able to begin sensing prayer as a TWO-way gaze of love. Only lately have I been able to let myself begin feeling God’s gaze resting on ME in my prayer. Looking back at me looking at God.

That’s how far I’ve come.

I’ve come a long way.

I have a long way to go to where God longs for me to be. But that’s fine. The Dragon, Shame, is in retreat.

I’m ready to be seen.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

— 1 Corinthians 13

All I Want for Christmas

“Once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands. …And that taught me you can’t have any thing, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Beautiful and the Damned"

This is the season of desire.

“O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” —that’s how the church year begins. “O, that you would tear open the heavens!” Like a child tearing wrapping paper on Christmas morning to get at the gift beneath. “O come, O come Emmanuel… Come, Wisdom, Come, Desire of nations…” We need you.

It’s a hard thing to admit.

But this is how we begin anew, with this cry from the depths, a cry of raw longing for the One who is both with us and beyond us. Source of our helpless yearning, and its answer.

Interesting, isn’t it, the way our culture transmutes that longing every year into craving for more stuff? Is it the invitation into Love’s mystery that sets off this frenzy of consuming within us and around us—blazing lights, frantic busyness, crowds, displays, loudspeakers to muffle our misgivings in the same sentimental tunes… and enthroned amidst it all, the jolly god of having and wanting, clad in red, drawing us in, claiming our hearts, promising to satisfy our emptiness once and for all…

Meanwhile, off to the side, the child lies in the manger—empty-handed, naked, helpless, homeless, and in need. He brings no host present because he is the gift, wrapped in torn strips of cloth. The gift and the giver both. The immeasurable longing, and its answer. What is his desire for us? What cry from his depths is trying to make itself heard through the honking horns and the 97th repetition of “All I Want for Christmas Is You”?

Or maybe that is the cry.

Whose desire is for whom, at Christmas time? Is it our desire for God, or God’s for us?

This Advent season, instead of the usual word of one or two syllables, my prayer in meditation is this: “You are the desire of my heart.”

You, and not my cravings or my anxiety or my resentments or my sense of responsibility or my lurking shame or my need to please or even my insatiable need to understand…

You are the desire of my heart.

Sometimes it is me saying it to Jesus. Sometimes it is Jesus saying it to me: You are the desire of my heart... not your dotted i's or crossed t's, not your oh-so-consciencious behavior or your guilt or your anxiety about letting me down or how nice a person you're able to be today, but you. You are the desire of my heart.

Really.

Come, Emmanuel, God with us. Come, desire of our hearts.

Without Filters, Without Conditions

Fifteen minutes before our official start time on the opening day of the Friday Café, the door opened and our first two guests walked in.

So many hours of planning and preparation had gone into this moment, and I felt totally unready. We hadn’t quite finished setting up. We hadn’t had time to fully prep our volunteers. The coffee wasn’t made—I’d underestimated how long it would take to heat the water in the big coffee maker.

But most of all I felt unready because I WAS unready. From the moment our guests walked in, the whole Café was out of my hands.

All I’d been doing with all the hours and hours and weeks and months of prep was creating a kind of container for the Holy Spirit. From now on what happens inside that container on Fridays from 1:00–5:00 is no one’s business but God’s. The rest of us are there to participate and to let be.

And sure enough, simple as the Café was and is, the Spirit made it so much more.

It’s all spiritual practice, right? Just like prayer and meditation. Discipline and practice and preparation all for the sake of making room for God. It’s all really just the practice of hospitality—and it is practice. It takes real work to welcome God in and be present to God being present to us.

I’m sure you’ve all heard that story about CBS anchor Dan Rather and Mother Teresa. Rather once asked Mother Teresa what she said during her prayers. “I listen,” she said. So Rather turned the question and asked, "Well then, what does God say?" Mother Teresa smiled. “He listens.”

It sounds like so little. But now we know, from reading her often anguished journals, that listening is hard work and a kind of dying—a laying down of ourselves, of our own efforts and accomplishments, everything we’ve done to get to that moment, in order to welcome Love without filters or conditions, not even the expectation that we will sense Love’s presence. Sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t. Learning to let that be is part of the total hospitality we are growing into.

Because what Love can do when we make room is so much more than anything we can ask or imagine.

Love Makes Lists

“From the time [my visions] were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing! Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else ever!’

So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting. Our beginning was when we were made, but the love in which he made us never had beginning. In it we have our beginning.”

— Julian of Norwich, REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, chapter 86

If you grew up (and raised children of your own) on the gentle teaching of Fred Rodgers, you’ll remember his song about the many ways to show love.

“There are many ways to say I love you.
There are many ways to say I care about you.
Many ways, many ways,
Many ways to say I love you.”

Then he would add verses to fit the show that day. “There’s the cooking way to say I love you,” he would remind us, singing directly into the camera. He must have known the show would air right before suppertime. All over America, stressed-out parents were trying to get the casserole in the oven before Mr. Rodgers changed out of his sneakers and put his cardigan back in the closet, and here was Mr. Rodgers himself, looking us in the eye, lifting that up as love. Yes, there are even TV ways to say I love you.

And there are lists. So many lists right now. People to call, e-mails to answer, orders to place—plans, meetings, notes. I have a cloud of details buzzing around my head like gnats. And all of them are the service of love.

Most of them are Friday Café related right now. We open November 14. But there are family matters too, and friends, and Wednesday Meditation, and this blog, and Bible Study, and a couple of church committees… Each deserves my attention, because each is an expression of incarnation, God’s love becoming real right here in this living moment. I’m on the Dollar Days website buying hygiene kits, I’m sending texts to team members about binders and bakeries, I’m ordering library books for my daughter who is coming to visit soon… because that’s what love does. It makes lists.

And then it puts them aside and tries, for a few sacred minutes, to forget they exist.

This past Friday fellow meditator Bonnie and I drove down to a Catholic retreat center in Duxbury for a workshop on centering prayer and the Cloud of Unknowing given by Fr. William Meninger—the monk whose teaching sparked the centering prayer movement in the 1970s. I’ll be sharing my notes from the retreat with you over the next several weeks. It was weird being the only Protestants, and good to be immersed in the spirituality of the Cloud—part mystical, part practical, and all kindness. It was especially good in this busy, charged time of anticipation to practice setting my concerns aside, even my loving concerns for others and the world, and simply center my attention and desire on God who is Love—love’s source, love’s spring, love’s fathomless generosity.

The lists will still be there when I get back. The needs of the world are many. But there are many ways to say I love you.

Knowing It Ends with Surely Goodness and Mercy

“PSALM

The only psalm I had memorized was the 23rd
and now I find myself searching for the order
of the phrases knowing it ends with surely
goodness and mercy will follow me
all the days of my life and I will dwell
in the house of the Lord forever only I remember
seeing a new translation from the original Hebrew
and forever wasn’t forever but a long time
which is different from forever although
even a long time today would be
good enough for me even a minute entering
the House would be good enough for me,
even a hand on the door or dropping today’s
newspaper on the stoop or looking in the windows
that are reflecting this morning’s clouds in first light.”

— Stuart Kestenbaum