Iffy Love / Advent Day 19

I love everybody
especially you. Lyle Lovett

At Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, the large bell gongs four times an hour, and you stop to love that moment. To breathe into that conversation. To notice the colors, the smells of that specific task. To remember your life, its beginning and its ending, so you can savor this chapter of your life, this paragraph, this phrase in its wondrous, ex-nihilo conception.

I sat up this morning at 6:01 am. We’re still sleeping upstairs in the living room, though the ventilation unit is installed, and the scant bedroom radon should be way scant now. In the dark, I sensed Marin semi-horizontal on the loveseat, trying to find some kind of comfort, being the living construction site for a fast-growing little baby. Matteo was one foam mattress over, in his butt-up face-down bug position. I thought, now would be the time to meditate. To actively love the moment, to breathe, to notice colors and smells, to remember beginnings and endings.

I’m writing instead, drinking coffee, pushing my way into a crowded subway car of my life, checking my transit map to try to figure out which line I transfer to in how many stops, and wondering if it will be obvious when I get there how I get a transfer, and will I arrive on time, and does it matter anyway. . .

There’s always a couple of weeks leading up to Christmas when I am thinking, I love everybody, especially you. I used to translate that into getting Alaska gifts for everyone in my immediate family and something thoughtful for everyone else, the people I love as friends and those who has been, as Esther used to say, over and again, "good to me." "You’re good to me, Cheffrey." Then there were the sermons to write and the long lines at the post office and suddenly, there’s Christmas in the rear view mirror.

So, I’ve been thinking it over again, how can I better love the people I love, to let their goodness permeate my heart, and to get past my misguided impulse to think myself more capable than I am, resulting in no love just blame: harping at my missed deadlines, unanswered letters, draft Christmas letter, my short temper. My best of intentions swirl into the stratosphere while actual flesh-and-blood relationships sail effortlessly apart like stars in an expanding universe.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Now there’s a thought on how to love the people you love. Open a new entrance into your safe, secure life where others can find shelter, nurture, sustenance. Lay down the welcome mat, if not the whole shebang. Martrydom (dying for the revolution), as they say, is the easy part.

Note: I always help Jesus along here in John chapter 15, by de-linking this stunning and brilliant thought from the next: "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you."

"If?" Can there be "ifs" in this realm?

Isn’t the power and glory found in the "unconditionality" of friendship, family? I suspect an anthropologist could make a strong argument that unconditionality is what what makes us fully human. Relationships work, they are miraculous and transforming when they are unconditional. Simply stated: we love because it’s in our nature to love, not because someone makes themselves easy to love. The harder to love, the more remarkable loving becomes.

Writing the gospel of John, pre-dawn mornings before going to work in first century Asia Minor, the authors lost their focus. From memories of what Jesus actually said, they fleshed out what stands as the most anti-semetic text of the Bible. They inserted a lot of huge, historically supremely tragic "ifs."

Advent, a time for weeding the ifs from the garden of our loves.