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.
Showing posts with label Friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Friends. Show all posts
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Prodigal Son / Advent Day 9
The sun was slanting across the bay as Marin, John, Teo and I had a breakfast in the 46th floor restaurant of the Hilton. Dan, my friend from Emmaus, called again. Our rendevous shifted to the community park in Chinatown.
We walked over, pushing Teo in an umbrella stroller through the canyons of downtown San Francisco. The portentous meeting came quicker than we imagined. In the middle of an ocean of Asian elders, kids, parents, shouts and careening young bodies and circles of men (gambling, we learned later), I was looking for Dan’s six-year-old triplets, John was trailing Matteo around, and Marin was using her cell phone to call Dan’s, when a man with a ball cap and sunglasses started across the square toward me.
It’s amazing to me how, in an instant, a figure goes from being a stranger to being an intimate. The alien advancing on me had to be Dan, but he looked like anyone but. Then I saw his older brother Willard in his chiseled features. I grabbed him in a hug. It has been probably upwards of 20 years since we’ve seen each other.
Myhanh, Dan’s wife, led us through the wilderness of Chinatown. With much asking around she found us a dim sum lunch spot. It was mobbed with locals. Somehow she talked us to the front of the line, our mob-let consisting of their four kids, our one, plus five adults. We entered a huge cavernous room with two hundred people around thirty round tables. The tables had a lazy susans to spin foods around, and Myhanh instantly was ordering things and rejecting other things, in what seemed to be Chinese. Does Myhanh, a Vietnamese woman, know Chinese, I asked Dan. Vietnamese is derived, he told me, from Chinese.
As the food went round, found plates and got eaten, Dan and I talked about how his three brothers are, with whom I have varying, fond friendships. And how his life is going, and mine. And about religion, which fascinates us both. I replayed Sam Harris’ (Letter to a Christian Nation) speech at the Aspen Summer Festival last night for Marin, so I was pretty fired up on how important it was to find a "non-religious" community to ally oneself with, one which behaved with the enthusiasm, kindness, vision, and certitude of a religious community (by, for example, taking in members, and bringing up children in the "faith"), but which focused on the blessings of life and the conservation of the earth rather than on using stone-age scriptures as the main guidepost for the challenges of our life together today.
Later, back at the community playground, while Dan and I aided Estelle in her quest to monkey across the overhead bars, one of the triplets, Peter, lost track of us, took off a couple of blocks away to a candy shop where he knew he could talk to the proprietor, and got him to look on Peter’s arm where phone numbers were inscribed in sharpie, and to call up Myhanh who was shopping. Dan was nonplussed by all the action, none of which we knew about until it was past. But he knew Peter would be utterly freaked out by being lost, and so he held him in a tight embrace for a while when they were reunited.
Lost and found, the prodigal son. It’s happening over and over to our children, to us, and also, as Jesus tells the story, to the one who catches up in a desperately happy embrace his lost and found child, to God himself.
We walked over, pushing Teo in an umbrella stroller through the canyons of downtown San Francisco. The portentous meeting came quicker than we imagined. In the middle of an ocean of Asian elders, kids, parents, shouts and careening young bodies and circles of men (gambling, we learned later), I was looking for Dan’s six-year-old triplets, John was trailing Matteo around, and Marin was using her cell phone to call Dan’s, when a man with a ball cap and sunglasses started across the square toward me.
It’s amazing to me how, in an instant, a figure goes from being a stranger to being an intimate. The alien advancing on me had to be Dan, but he looked like anyone but. Then I saw his older brother Willard in his chiseled features. I grabbed him in a hug. It has been probably upwards of 20 years since we’ve seen each other.
Myhanh, Dan’s wife, led us through the wilderness of Chinatown. With much asking around she found us a dim sum lunch spot. It was mobbed with locals. Somehow she talked us to the front of the line, our mob-let consisting of their four kids, our one, plus five adults. We entered a huge cavernous room with two hundred people around thirty round tables. The tables had a lazy susans to spin foods around, and Myhanh instantly was ordering things and rejecting other things, in what seemed to be Chinese. Does Myhanh, a Vietnamese woman, know Chinese, I asked Dan. Vietnamese is derived, he told me, from Chinese.
As the food went round, found plates and got eaten, Dan and I talked about how his three brothers are, with whom I have varying, fond friendships. And how his life is going, and mine. And about religion, which fascinates us both. I replayed Sam Harris’ (Letter to a Christian Nation) speech at the Aspen Summer Festival last night for Marin, so I was pretty fired up on how important it was to find a "non-religious" community to ally oneself with, one which behaved with the enthusiasm, kindness, vision, and certitude of a religious community (by, for example, taking in members, and bringing up children in the "faith"), but which focused on the blessings of life and the conservation of the earth rather than on using stone-age scriptures as the main guidepost for the challenges of our life together today.
Later, back at the community playground, while Dan and I aided Estelle in her quest to monkey across the overhead bars, one of the triplets, Peter, lost track of us, took off a couple of blocks away to a candy shop where he knew he could talk to the proprietor, and got him to look on Peter’s arm where phone numbers were inscribed in sharpie, and to call up Myhanh who was shopping. Dan was nonplussed by all the action, none of which we knew about until it was past. But he knew Peter would be utterly freaked out by being lost, and so he held him in a tight embrace for a while when they were reunited.
Lost and found, the prodigal son. It’s happening over and over to our children, to us, and also, as Jesus tells the story, to the one who catches up in a desperately happy embrace his lost and found child, to God himself.
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