This past week, I was hit by love three times.
The first happened when I was at the school near our church. I was popping in for a visit, after setting up some crafts at the church, and I had my huge messenger bag over my shoulder. I have a collection of buttons pinned there, and one of them is a drawing of an anatomical heart. One of the kids saw it and asked me about it. At first he thought it was lungs. So I explained to him that it was a heart. Then he thought it was really cool. I told him that it was to remind me that love is something we need to work at, that it isn’t just a feeling, but it’s something that requires big muscles. I don’t know what the teacher thought.
I’d had the buttons made up a few years ago when I worked with teenagers in Ottawa. We did a monthly youth service together, and one February, we thought that it would be pretty appropriate to talk about love and about how we represent it with that big muscle smack dab in the middle of our chests. We use big muscles to do mighty deeds.
I left the school, hoping that my words made sense in some way. I hoped that I wasn’t just throwing words around.
The second love moment occurred when I was reading poetry and minding my own business. I was reading Rilke’s Book of Hours, a collection of love poems to God.
I found this:
We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.
Once again from the old paintboxes
we take the same gold for the scepter and the crown
that has disguised you through the ages.
Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.
In the midst of Advent, leaning into Christmas already, the things of God get glitter-encrusted pretty easily. I want to describe God’s mighty deeds of love, I want to help share glimpses of God’s love, but how often do my hands and words just hide them?
So, more advent prayers well up. For all of us in these last days of advent.
I pray that we could let our hearts simply open.
I pray that we didn’t let ourselves get tangled up in all the wrong things about this time of year trying to make everything feel right.
I pray that we could stop hiding God.
I pray that we could let our hearts do the work of loving – making space for each other in the coldest part of the year, reaching out rather than staying turned inwards. Even in our own homes, doing the work of welcoming each other with love. Listening to each other’s fears and feelings, and getting on with the cold-toes work of getting out of bed again to answer the cries in the night.
I pray that we can hold onto the hope, peace, and joy of advent to adequately do the work of love.
It’s dark at this time of year, isn’t it? And it’s easier to look to pretty things than to pull ourselves out of ourselves to work at loving others. Maybe this too is Advent – walking through the dark days at the end of the year, knowing bone-deep that we need another Love to make love work.
Love hit three is a bit more sentimental, but maybe that balances out the others. Because sometimes love isn’t work at all. Sometimes, it’s just the overwhelming rightness of someone else, speaking their heart’s words.
We had a Christmas party at church last week. Fun and messy crafts in the hall, then into the sanctuary for singing. Blue sat near me, and together, as best we could, we sang a wide range of tunes, both songs and hymns. Jingle Bells, I Saw Three Ships, Frosty the Snowman, etc.,etc. We finished with Away in a Manger. At the end of the second verse, he looked up at me with great big eyes full of love. That is good, isn’t it? Yes, it is good. I may wrinkle my nose at the vertical cosmology of Jesus looking down from the sky, but, as we sang “and stay by my side until morning is nigh,” my own dear boy glimpsed Love. And he shared it with me. That glimpse that made his heart open to the work of Love.
And yes, my love, it is good.
