Crumpling Up Our Charts

 

As you try to chart love, you may be feeling some resistance, reluctance, or resentment.  Love can’t be charted, contained, or controlled.  You may look at your chart and just think, “This tiny box doesn’t do justice to what I felt with mom/dad/divorced spouse/child who broke your heart or a friend who fills your heart so full it could burst.”  You may wonder, “Why am I doing this again?”  You don’t have to.  Not that you need it, but you have permission to stop working on the chart.  You can rip it up and recycle it.  The chart is an invitation to explore why the word love lands in different ways within us.  My prayer was that it would help you notice and name why your inner defense attorney yelled, “Objection,” when you hear this word in church.  Our Hebrew friends talk about love manifest in kindness or walking in God’s ways.  Rabbi Held says that love is an “existential posture”; it is how I show up and stand in the world today, the ways I orient my life, the direction and destination.  Held also says love is a commitment to work that takes a lifetime.  Love becomes less an emotion to tend, and more a way of tending our lives.  Love is willing to be a dance partner with countless other emotions.  This means that love and anger can co-exist within us at times (although both emotions burn a lot of calories, so it is hard to maintain them both over time).  How can we let love and anger talk to each other?  How do we let love and exhaustion inform each other?  Are we willing to take our place in exploring the whole wheel of emotions?  Trying to walk the tightrope of exploring our experiences of love is not easy.  Perhaps, given all that is going on in the world outside your window and as you peer into the window of your soul, it might just be too much right now.  So, set aside the chart.  Not every tool is helpful for every prayer practice.  I don’t want a sledgehammer when I go out to garden.  I don’t need loopers to fix a leak under my sink.  Same with the way-less way of life.  I pray that you might write down what is stirring within you as you ponder how the ties that bless us can also bound/bind us, cutting off oxygen and leaving hurtful wounds.  How the ties that hold us together come unraveled.  Take what you can from what I am saying, leave the rest.  May you experience and encounter God’s presence in these days in countless ways.  Amen.