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.
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.