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.

The Beloved / Advent Day 18

In the gospel of John, there is a disciple of Jesus who is called, simply, the "beloved" disciple. He is introduced halfway through, days before Jesus death. After Jesus washes the disciples feet – sort of like cheerfully sprucing up the toilets of a home where you’re a guest as an example of serene, committed hospitality – he begins to talk about one of his followers turning him over to the police.

Then it reads: "One of the disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to Jesus..." Immediately, Peter asks this "beloved" disciple to be an intermediary, grilling Jesus as to who the betrayer is. This shows that Peter, in other gospels the go-to guy, is really not tops on Jesus’ list, at least not in the Gospel of John. The beloved disciple is.

This shows that at the beginning of Christianity there was a non-hierarchical way of "following Jesus." It was community-based, not leader-centered, and focused on relationships rooted in authentic love, not on doctrines or on the succession of dynasties. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. One led to the Vatican, which did all it could to destroy the other road compeletly. The other led to the Society of Friends (the Quakers), and all kinds of committed communities based on human rights and earth-sustainability.

My friend Kathy Franzenburg, a Lutheran pastor in Palmer, AK and now in Iowa, sent me an interpretation of the Psalms which refers to God always as "the Beloved." It’s not your grandmother’s Book of Psalms. A "beloved" God assures that there is love at the center of each of the 150 laments, prayers, and songs. Christians would call it "grace," as in "Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound."

With love stipulated as being central, community follows. Love, at the center of things, means that we are all part of one community, even if we fail to acknowledge it or live by it.

I believe this. I believe that when we live as if we are part of a community, things fall into place nicely. When we don’t, it’s sometimes easier – like not changing the oil in the car is easier. But it’s also destructive, possibly painful, and probably irresponsible.

Beloved. I was telling Marin as we drove through the -30 degree ice fog this morning – her truck blew a hose – that a lot of the edginess and difficulty of the Psalms can vanish in this interpretation.

Psalm 137, for example, a lament of a captive, hauled across the desert from Zion where God dwells -- Jerusalem -- to a ghetto "By the Waters of Babylon." His revenge fantasy includes dashing infants, children of his captor, against rocks. (Luther finessed this psalm, apparently, by allegorizing infants as nascent sin, and rocks as sturdy Jesus: dash those infants!) In the new interpretation, the songs that are sung in Psalm 137, are sung by dolphins, and no alien babies are harmed, or even mentioned.