Five years ago, after a five-year period of great internal upheaval - a season of intense questioning of every assumption I had held to that point, theological and otherwise…a season of constant internal and external dialogue, of reading, journalling, crying, raging, praying, thinking - oh, the ceaseless thinking! - I finally went quiet inside. If you’ve never gotten to the other side of an intense kind of struggle, I’m not sure the nature of the quietness I’m talking about can be known through description alone. I think it has to be experienced. It isn’t despair. It isn’t bitterness. It isn’t apathy. It’s a strange kind of coming-to-the-end-of-a-road. You get there and you realize you’ve been running or flailing or crying or self-pitying or raging or crawling or thinking yourself down a path, a path you probably didn’t choose and also couldn’t help yourself traveling once you found yourself on it, and here you are now, at the end. And the end isn’t some grand finale, some palace of gold or terrible awful hell, or a guru waiting to clear up all your confusion. It isn’t a cushy place set up for renewal or a therapist’s chair or a breathtaking view. It doesn’t even have a sign of any kind, no lable, no lentil to walk through to make the end official. The path just sort of peters out, and you find yourself in the middle of unmanicured landscape. Maybe there’s a few trees around, some grass, a couple butterflies. There’s the click of a grasshopper, a breeze. But there you are, and all the things that made you lose your mind along that ordeal, all the things that made the rage and fear and hopelessless and grief and have-to-make-sense-of-things-now so all-consuming don’t seem so pressing anymore. In fact the thought of intentionally pressing into them again only makes your mind stop, and the place where feelings come from close its doors. While for so many years your internal chatter hasn’t ceased, you’re left now with only the sounds of trees.

I think it takes a long time to get to a place like this. Probably the petering out of a path happens gradually, too. And in all honesty, wandering off the end of a path, at least for me, has often wound me up entering it again at some point, or many, thinking to myself, “Wasn’t I through with this one? Huh…”

But these endings. They’re real. I remember sitting with N in that initial quiet season, eating dinners silently. We still loved each other tons, and were glad to be in one another’s company, but very little came to mind to say. Our silence was the end of that road. The buzz of locusts. A faint hint of looking back along what we had just traversed, thinking wordlessly, “What in the world just happened??”

I feel like I’m in a similar kind of quiet these days. It’s different in that I haven’t just been through a painful ordeal. I’ve been writing my book and raising my boy and being a wife and friend and sister and daughter. I’ve been thinking and reading and blogging and paying attention to the worlds inside and around me. But something about everything altogether, about the energy I have to learn and understand, to engage people and ideas meaningfully, to try to be the best me I can be - something about all of it has taken me to one of these endings, and I find myself so quiet. I find myself needing rest. Nourishing food (of the literal variety). Needing not to think.

Can any of you relate? What do you do when you’re in this kind of place?

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, The Devil and Miss Prym, and was surprised to be confronted in its preface with a belief I thoroughly own. The surprise wasn’t in the belief itself, since on tons of levels I resonate with Coelho’s thought, but rather in realizing it totally contradicts, at least on first blush, another of my convictions. So I want to explore this contradiction and see if it really exists.

Here’s the quote:

Each of the three books [in Coelho’s trilogy And on the Seventh Day] is concerned with a week in the life of ordinary people, all of who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death and power. I have always believed that in the lives of individuals, just as in society at large, the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame. When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.

The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

My view of destiny is broad, and is more about a pulse inside of us than any pre-ordained script, so maybe don’t get caught up on that part. The idea I’m most intrigued by is this one that “the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame,” and “a week is more than enough time” for such changes to take place.

I think Coelho’s right. Totally. For all the apparent slowness of progress–inside ourselves, in the world around us–big things often happen in an instant. Big ideas get born, equations get solved, accidents kill, decisions get made, yeildedness happens to an inner voice, or to some person that we love, but haven’t been able to reconcile with. These things happen quickly, don’t they?

Or do they?

One of my biggest frustrations with certain brands of Christianity is the way conversion is understood in them. In such places, conversion is seen as the moment when a person magically transforms from something they’ve always been into something totally new. Bam! No process, no recovery, no counseling or hard work. A single prayer and the person is, or should be, if they were sincere, a happy, joyful God-child. Forever.

I have many problems with this, but for now I’ll focus on one: that person who prayed that special prayer? They won’t be happy all the time. They won’t always have joy. And odds are the same patterns that got them yearning for salvation in the first place are still, moments and even weeks or years after conversion, just that. Patterns. Anyone who has broken a pattern knows, with a few remarkable exceptions, that patterns take lots and lots of practice to break.

The transformations I’ve experienced thus far have taken terribly much time to happen, or at least I experience their unfolding that way, and the happiness and joy that I experience now, in far greater abundance than ever I experienced in any orthodox fold, have been won by terribly much work. Hundreds of hours of journaling and pondering and reading and talking and sleeping and waiting and sighing and crying and laughing and going to therapy. I’m an evangelical believer in healing and transformation and redemption and change. But I’m an angry mama bear at the suggestion that such things should happen quickly, or easily, or in response to some pre-scripted prayer.

But–and this is where the yieldedness I mentioned earlier comes in–I do believe in tipping points. I believe processes, for all their infinite unfolding, contain moments like Coelho talks about, choices that confront us, and on which mountains of things, whole worlds of things, depend.

So here’s my conclusion: I believe in conversion (religious and not), and that a choice in a moment, experienced as a turning from old to new, can make all the difference in the world. I believe a week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destinies, and also that our destinies are far more tenacious than to let us go if our choice, in such a week or moment (or weak moment), is against them.

Heather asked about my mention of fear in the last post, about how the undoing of it is one of the things I’m giving my life to. So I’ll try and explain more of what I mean by that.

I think fear is at the heart of our world’s problems. How’s that for a bold statement?? I think it’s at the heart of our individual problems, and at the heart of our collective problems, and the reason why it’s such an uphill thing, at least much of the time, to work well (or at all) together toward good.

Pushed far enough, maybe the core of our fear is fear of death, but I don’t think that’s what most of us are conscious of. I think most of us are conscious of fears like that of loneliness, joblessness, lack of clear or appealing identity, debt, getting dumped, getting raped, getting robbed, being ugly, being fat or thin in all the wrong places, losing health, losing respect, losing popularity, losing our minds.

I think there’s another whole layer of fear, though, that we’re not so conscious of, and that may be far more toxic than the rest. I think it has to do with who we are in a very deep and vulnerable place, and the kinds of questions we ask from there. Are we loveable?, is a big one. Are we okay? Is the world an inherently hostile place? Will the people I love abandon me? Will they get taken away? Will I have to suffer more than I can bear? Does God exist? Is God as critical as it seems sometimes? Are you going to hurt me? You? How ’bout you? Are you going to make me feel small? Will you take advantage of my weakness if I show it…or can’t hide it like I’d wish?

At heart, and of course to varying levels, I think we’re all afraid, and that every one of the “stupid” things we do collectively or individually can be traced to this. I think they can be traced to trying to protect ourselves, or keep from gaining or losing the things we’re afraid we’ll gain or lose. Traced to making sure that whatever hurt us before won’t ever hurt us again.

Surely many of our fears are well-founded. They make sense, and they’re there for good reason. But I think far more often than not, they’re bigger than they need to be, and when acted upon, only perpetuate the need that we and those around us have to be afraid. If I get defensive, for example, because I’m afraid you’ll trump my view, then my defensiveness will cause your voice to raise, and your defensiveness along with it. The two (three?) will escalate until we’re saying and doing things we never thought we would, given how we felt only five minutes ago. We will be fanning the flames of distrust for future interactions. We will be fanning flames of shame for having overreacted, if indeed we see that’s what we’ve done. We will be shrinking the bold, expansive, playful, curious, eager, trusting parts of ourselves that can’t come out when fear is at the helm, and nurturing an inner tightness, a vigilence, self-consciousness, clenched fists. We won’t be able to think about the common good, but be consumed with shoring up what we personally (as individuals, groups, nations) haven’t yet lost. At the farthest, most gruesome extreme, we will start wars.

I think versions of this process happen constantly, at every level, around us. It’s a web of fear and subsequent violence…and subsequent woundings, and the needs that follow our wounds to be afraid and protect ourselves…that we all get born into.

So. I want to be about the undoing of fear. I want to be about the shrinking of it, where it’s grown too big. I think the opposite of fear is trust, so I want to be on expeditions everywhere to unveil reasons for fear to actually turn into trust: trust that life can be good, that we’re okay–all the way to our core, that healing can happen, that no critical God exists apart from the ones we’ve grown inside ourselves, that our vulnerable selves can actually find safe places to be seen, and loved, and nurtured on toward Life, in the very best sense of that word.

I’m a writer, so written words are what I use most toward this end. But I think the shrinking of fear and the growth of trust can happen by many other means. I’m experiencing it through Qigong. I’ve felt it in Tai Chi, and the belly dance classes I’ve taken. In therapy. In laughter at no one’s expense. In sex and hugs and friends’ and mentors’ presence. Through music and visual arts. Through the work of raising my son. I see it happening as people love their pets, and as the motley crew of us gathers daily at the neighborhood park to talk and watch our kids play.

As far as I can tell, fear feeds on judgment and criticism and threats and looks of disapproval, so none of these, despite our best efforts at using them on ourselves or others well (said partly in jest, but partly with all seriousness), can lead to the alchemy I’m talking about, I don’t think. Trust is allergic to them. I think trust is allergic to many of the concepts of God that we work hard to feel loved by.

So this–this work of undoing fear and cultivating trust–is what I’m giving my life to. It’s the wind that fills up my sails and urges me on to write.

Bob from The Corner has invited anyone who is interested to participate in a gridblog inspired by Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead). He writes (and invites to be shared around):

I am emailing you to ask if you would consider joining a gridblog to share your own experiences with the loss of a loved one – a gridblog entitled THE MARIGOLD PATH that would be across the Internet on Nov. 1 & Nov. 2. This gridblog is inspired by the experience of Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead)…with the gridblog name inspired by the practice of children carrying yellow marigolds as they follow the procession to the cemetery.

I thought of Trish, who has been thinking and writing and composing in honor of women who are dying or have died, and of others I know who are grieving the deaths of people, and also the deaths of dreams. If any of you are interested in joining this blogwalk of reflection and remembrance, whether for a person who has died, or for some other thing in your life that has passed, go here for more details.

I’m in.

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

I know many of you are not involved in a Christian subculture, but those of you who are might appreciate what Bobbie has to say in her latest post, Dirty Little Secrets:  Porn and the Church.  Regardless of how you personally define God and Satan, heaven or hell, I think her theory makes a lot of sense, and gets to some important layers of what’s true of us–maybe particularly of those involved in public forms of ministry or service.  Go check it out.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the Towers falling, and hundreds more of waves of effects, rippling out from that day. 

When the Towers fell, I had just finished seminary, was one month into therapy, and about three years into the most paralyzing identity crisis I had known.  It was the second day of a week of testing my blood sugars hourly in attempts at getting them controlled.  The stress of the preceding years had taken it’s toll on my body, and I had developed hypoglycemia.  I was hunkering down by this and other means to be more careful, that is, full of care, for this body that is me, and this psyche that was so in need of attention.

So my reaction to the attacks was different than it would have been at any other time in my life.

At any other time, I would have probably cried a lot that week.  I would have probably focused in on all the images of tears, of horror-stricken faces, of bloodied bodies and terrified eyes, hanging posters of loved ones, hoping them alive.  My soul would have conformed to these images, taking on the feelings I saw there, experiencing them, at least fractionally, as my own.  By the end of that week, I would have been exhausted.

But I already was exhausted at that point, so the energy I had to give new feelings was low.  I was also freshly learning that my tendency to become the suffering around me was more about me suffering what was inside myself, and needing outlets for that, since I wasn’t doing it consciously for me.  It was also about suffering for the people I was close to and cared deeply for, but felt powerless to help.  Displaced care was what it was, at least largely.  And not by choice, I was learning fall of 2001 that the compassion I sloshed over everyone else needed channelling toward me.  If, in fact, I was interested in healing.

And I was.  Desperately.

So my heart sunk like everyone else’s that day, and I stayed shaken from any sense of normalcy.  But I didn’t descend toward despair like was my former style.  I kept checking my blood sugars.  I kept eating snacks.  I went to therapy the next day and talked, after the first number of minutes, about things other than New York.

Surely there are degrees of connection, and were I living anywhere near New York at the time, or had I known anyone injured or killed in that Nightmare, I would have appropriately been consumed for months, if not years, with fear and grief and rage.  So I want to tread carefully here, and say what I really mean.

What I mean is that there are awful, awful things happening in our world every minute.  And not just far from where I am.  They’re next door.  They’re in the next block.  They’re all across our country.  And there are wonderful things, too, and wonderful movements of people to join–people caring about and engaging all the yuck, and with hope and courage and imagination.

But since fall of 2001, only coincidentally starting at the same time as those attacks, I have been working hard to more mindfully listen to myself and tend to my own suffering first, so that the tending I do outwardly might be more true.  By true I mean being less about displaced compassion–less about spinning subconscious wheels to try to get my needs for self-love and attention met, or to try to be helpful in a world where the people I care most for appear so unhelpable–and more about compassion bubbling consciously up from the wounds that I’ve tended inside myself.  And from knowing, because of that tending, who I am and the kind of "tree" that I am–the kinds of yuck that my shade and shelter instinctually move toward.  Those are the things to which I want to give my life.  Those are what I want to be missional about, and do what it takes to engage.  To not become indifferent toward.

Everything else is torches others must carry.  I have only two hands and one heart, and not just any hands and heart, but mine, which are wonderfully fashioned for a certain kind of engagement with our world–with its ugliness and it’s breathtaking beauty.  They’re poorly made for other kinds, and the more I learn to recognize which is which, the less money I’ll need to spend on therapy.  And the more all of us benefit. 

Or so I’m thinking.

So I live in this post 9/11 world.  I live under a president whose decisions I’m ashamed of and angered by.  I live in a region where poverty gets shuffled to the other side of the tracks and keeping up with the Joneses is considered high moral ground.  I live where people know more about work than they do about their families, and where they have to, because it costs that much to live.

But I’m not giving a lot of energy to these things.  And not because I don’t think they need lots of people, pouring lots of energy into addressing them.  I’m not because my energy for doing what seems like good in the world is being spent elsewhere, being nurtured for other things.  I’m pouring it into trying to stay awake to the souls around me, to inner change, to possibilities for healing.  To what it means to heal after being hurt by religion and by being silenced and by feeling shame.  To talking about beauty and calling attention to it.  To honoring what often goes unnoticed.

I’m trying to find that space where care for the layers of suffering in our world is neither narrowed by tunnel vision on these things that I’m about, nor made bland by getting spread too thin.  Where I own my own suffering, and tend to it, so that what I end up spilling inadvertantly around me is hope, of the realest, most authentic kind.  Is shade from my branches, reaching naturally toward sun.

For the longest time I’ve had a picture of a sunrise as the background on my computer.  Orange and gold pouring over choppy sea.  I put that up about the time I had a surge of things to write–on my blog, and in the fiction I’m working on this summer.  I felt bold and full of words.  Active and free.  A healthy dose of yang, you might say.

Just after finishing up that series on bodies, I had a dream.  I was in a building with a group of some kind, and I thought we all were leaving.  A swarm of crows was attacking us, and I knew it would only get worse outside.  Feeling like Harry Potter, or some other child-on-a-mission, I quickly ran ahead to distract that swarm with some sweets I had made.  To save the group.

But when I got outside, there were no crows.  In fact, the group that I was with wasn’t there either.  Turning back inside, disappointed that my grand aspirations weren’t required, I discovered another group of folks rehearsing for some play.  They were dancing.  And it was beautiful.  I recognized dear friends among them, and after a moment of feeling way out of place, way underdressed, I realized I fit perfectly in.  The dream ended with some shady, unkind characters telling me I had bad breath and me determining I wouldn’t say one more word until I could brush my teeth.

My therapist would be all over this one.

But here’s the thing:  I think she would be right if she said it was calling me back inside, back to the dance.  And by dance, I think I mean something archetypal, something about expressing the self–not because one has to, or because one is trying to set anything right or look good in anyone’s eyes, but because one can.  Or must.  I think the dream is calling me back away from taking my external life too seriously, back from trying to address my own demons everywhere else but where they actually reside:  inside.

So I had this dream, and I slowly grew more quiet.  Not because I’m afraid my breath stinks, because I think the characters who said that were "demons", and precisely the kind of crows I must confront inside.  But because I feel drawn inward, to listen again, to wait.  And to practice the dance.  I wonder how many of us on an inner path of healing get right to the point where we’re learninig our authentic dance, right to the point where things are coming together inside, clicking, falling into place, and then move outward.  Move quickly on to extrovert the things we’ve learned, not realizing we haven’t yet mastered our dance, and that all our outside doing might actually make us forget the few steps that we’ve learned. 

I have a night scene on my computer screen now.  A hillside watched by the moon.  As I drifted to sleep last night I pictured myself dancing on it, moonlight soft against my skin.  I pictured dancing long and gracefully, round and round, arms up and down.  And I finally rested on that hilltop, alone, my heart calm and also full with the memory of the dance.  Full with knowing I’m here, and, here is good, and there is day and there is night on this day of creation.

A very nice essay on shame, written by a gifted writer I met just recently, here.

I’ve been talking about bodies, and about the shame that so many of us feel in relation to them—about their size or appearance, their functions or lacks thereof, the experiences they have or haven’t had.  About how body wounds run deep.  I’ve been talking about an opening that seems necessary if we want our shame to go away, and how, unchristian that I am, I see this opening reflected in the Bible.  And I want to step away from the Bible for a minute to explain more fully what I think I’m trying to mean.  This is intuitive stuff here, in addition to stuff consciously thought, so I’m feeling my way along even as I write.

It seems to me that shame is about believing there is something inherently wrong with us, something we mostly can’t help (I say mostly because some shame circles around feeling like we should be able to help whatever it is that’s wrong with us, but just aren’t).  So helping shame fade is a matter of helping that belief in our messed-upness fade, and helping a new belief replace it.  One that’s something about us being fine, being actually good and loveable.  Not perfect, not in need of no growth or change or healing.  But fine.  Like in a fundamental way.  In a sense that envelops all of us, too—not just the clean parts or the nice parts or the parts we let other people see.  The sense I mean holds all of who we are.

So the question becomes, How does this happen?  How does the fading of this inherently-flawed belief happen, and the introduction and growth of a new and different one? 

This is where I think Love comes in.  I don’t think any of this can happen without it.  And this is where the opening I’m exploring comes in, too, because just like “fade” and “growth” imply, Love can’t zap shame instantly out of us.  At least as far as I can see.  It’s one of those laws of shame, I think:  must get undone slowly.

A few posts back I wrote about grace (here and here), and how maybe the experience of it is actually a stepping stone to realizing there isn’t any need of it, that the experience of grace is what helps us realize we actually do deserve kindness, actually do deserve love.  The experience of grace unravels in our minds the very reality of grace. 

So.  I think experiences of love are similar.  And I’m not capitalizing love here intentionally, because I’m meaning something other than Love, which to me means the most massive and unboundaried and flooring and simultaneously gentle stuff there is, whereas love means lesser versions of that, ones that are peppered with all the normal stuff of us:  gaminess, impatience, I’ll-love-you-if-you-love-me-back, limited understanding of the beloved and all they’ve been through, all they are, I’ll-love-you-if-you-stroke-my-ego-and-reassure-me-constantly-that-I’m-your-favorite-one, etc.  Experiences of love—this peppered-with-normal-human-stuff kind—are a stepping stone, I’m thinking, or at least can be one, to realizing and experiencing the reality of Love, and actually taking on more and more of It’s traits.  Love unravels love, if that makes sense.  It enlightens. Its light reveals love for what it is, which is less than Love, and in so doing, in the very same breath, reveals us for what we are.  And what I think it reveals is that we’re good.  Fundamentally so.  Fine, just exactly as we are.  And to repeat myself, I don’t mean in no need of healing, or growth, or change.  I mean fine in a fundamental sense, and therefore having nothing to be ashamed of.

So to be less heady about all of this, and more clear about what I mean by Love revealing us for what we are.  Let’s say I feel ashamed of being so tall, ashamed that this makes me so different from what I’ve got in my head is the standard of feminine beauty.  And let’s say I’m ashamed of the veins on my legs, too, that their ever-darkening, ever-multiplying-before-my-eyesness doesn’t strike me so well.  And maybe I wish I could dance better, too, and that I could jog, rather than only walk, because I have in my mind that jogging is more cool, and the back problems that keep me from doing so aren’t.  And that surgery on my toe?  It didn’t leave the nail looking so good.  And there’s a scar from where that mole got removed.  And where that baby was removed.  And maybe all my issues with my body—all the ones I might say in a note like this and beyond—spill over into issues with my personality and my education and my life experiences.  And maybe I try to downplay all of these things, all of the things I’m ashamed of, when I’m getting to know someone new.

Does any of this sound familiar?

But let’s say this person that I’m getting to know comes to love me.  Let’s say they’re not really paying much attention to these things I’m trying to hide.  Let’s say they’re noticing things they genuinely like about me, things they find charming.  And, let’s even say they may not like me so much—love me so much—if they knew my whole story.

But that’s the point:  they only love me.  They don’t Love me.  But you know what?  Their love alone, with a lower-case ‘l’, begins to heal me.  It speaks a different voice from the one(s) in my head and starts a new belief going:  maybe I’m loveable.

And maybe I’m lucky enough to find a friend who sees some of these parts I’m ashamed of, I mean truly sees them, and doesn’t turn away.  Maybe their love is actually big enough to hold some of those parts, maybe even big enough to demonstrate instinctually that no effort is actually required to love some them, because they’re fine.  Totally par for the human course.

So something starts to open up inside of me.  Some clenched up ball begins to loosen, and I start to realize that the love that felt so good at first, but that came on the condition that I don’t really show my whole self, wasn’t actually as big as this love I’m now being given.  Maybe this love has a bigger sort of ‘l’ at the front, is just a little less mixed up with all the stuff that’s less than Love.

So an opening starts to happen, where I start to recognize what Love is, and in It’s light, even if only a glimmer, I start to see that I’m loveable.  And when I start to feel loveable, I start to not have to hide so much, or at least so much of the time.  So a relaxedness starts to grow where worry used to be.  Fear of exposure and rejection starts to fray. 

When any of this happens, even just a tiny little bit, surely angels sing.

But here’s where I think we get in trouble, where this opening I’m talking about gets stalled up sometimes, and frozen uncomfortably close to closed:  when we mistake love for Love.  When we equate the two, and believe everything love has to say.  Which, at least in all my listening, isn’t altogether nice.  To put it mildly.  love is mixed up with all the things that make us real, which means things like shame and fear and lust and maybe a deep, deep need for control.  Its voices aren’t only about healing and making us whole.

I think this connects with the Bible.  I think the openings that are in it, the ones I described in that last post, that can deepen and widen our concept of Love, can be used to do the very opposite.  We can take what an opening reveals and equate what we see with Love, all the way, as though every veil has been lifted and the Whole Truth revealed.  We can say God = love, and obligate ourselves to reify some version of this, rather than look for ways that Love is being cracked open, pointing ever beyond our concepts of love.  I think we can do this with openings outside of the Bible, too.

The people I know who seem most deeply unashamed seem to be in a lifelong process of opening.  Love is always getting unveiled for them, veil off of veil, sometimes shockingly, sometimes disturbingly so.  Often in ways that shake up old categories.  This process seems to embolden and humble them at the same time.  They get more joyful and their voices more free.  It makes them looser, if you want to put it that way—less worried about being right and making sure they’re on the right side of boundaries and more concerned with living, and making safe space for others to do so, too—for all of us to live well.

love opens us up to Love, is what I’m trying to say.  Or has the potential to.  And I think it’s when we find ourselves inside Love’s reach, or at least start getting the hunch that that’s where we belong, when we discover ourselves to be inherently loveable, and therefore fundamentally good, our height and our weight and our shape and our smells and our bodily functions and the experiences we have and haven’t had; our sexual orientations and genders and (un)athleticism and (un)paired-upness with someone we love—everything that makes us such embodied creatures:  all of it starts being less and less grounds for fear and shame.  A new kind of core starts taking shape, I think, inside of us, and our wounds become that much less crippling.  They don’t define us any more.

Openings like these are becoming my guiding lights.  They’re what my body yearns for and my soul is drawn toward.  In the Bible, and anywhere else I can find them.