Love Lives

View from Galbraith Mountain on our Thanksgiving Day Mountain Bike Ride

Here we are in the darkest days of the year, finishing the Thanksgiving holiday with a deep dive into Black Friday Weekend. Personally,  I am not sure when Black Friday  became a whole weekend. And maybe it is just me, but did anyone else receive multiple daily emails from every company from which they have made a single order within the last decade? 

We lit the first candle on the Advent wreath in church this morning ushering in the official season of “expectant waiting.”  I always loved Advent season as a child. Between lighting the candles as a family each week and opening a daily window on my advent calendar, the season brought ritual, connection, and a kind of devotion-infused wonder that remains part of who I am today.   We didn’t have a lot of presents growing up. My family  didn’t  have a lot of money when I was young and being practical people, my parents  didn’t use the little money they had buying expensive gifts. And yet, I spent the advent season with  a quality of expectancy, though I wouldn’t have called the feeling “expectancy”  then. 

As an adult, I don’t always relate to “expectancy” in a positive way. I think all the yoga training to “be with what is,”  to “live in the present moment,” and the idea that “one’s serenity is inversely proportional to one’s expectations,” along with a healthy measure of anxiety and uneasy uncertainty about modern  life, has often held  expectancy  at odds with equanimity. In terms of spiritual life, however, I don’t think expectancy is the same as expectations, be those expectations positive thoughts or visions of impending doom.  I think expectancy has something to do with honoring the seasons of gestation— of the winters in life that, for all of their busy-ness and outer demands, are often marked by  ennui, not-knowing, and waiting. Seems to me that there are periods of gestation that are slower than one would wish, less knowable than is comfortable, and more necessary than surface-life typically validates and supports. 

One of my students is pregnant and wrote a poignant essay about how people reach out and  touch her growing belly without asking her for permission. Some have even put their faces on her  stomach. (I know, right? Evidently, it’s not just  one person going rogue or being devoid of decent boundaries. Several people have put their faces on her abdomen. Good lord. Her actual stomach! Their faces! Oy vey.)

And while my outrage/solidarity might be bit of a digressive rant, it’s also a wonderful image for just how intrusive I can sometimes be with myself and whatever small Golden Child is incubating within my psyche at any given time. I want to know “What is growing in there?  How will it turn out? Will people like it? Can I make money with it? Will this new creation disrupt my life or make my life better?  Or will it  make life worse and then better?  Or better and then worse?  Can this new life within me grow without stretch marks, weight gain, loss of identity, and without leaving a lasting scar on who I currently know myself to be? Will I be able to change without  losing sleep, losing friends, or losing face?”  And so on. Just like a stranger without appropriate boundaries, I can trespass against the vessel that houses the sacred womb where new life grows within me.

Expectancy is being with all that madness while practicing (emphasis on practice) the fine art of  “Trusting the Slow Work of God” as Christian mystic, Teilhard de Chardin once wrote. Whether I am gestating creative projects or new behaviors, habits, and ways of being, the process takes time, has its own wisdom, and is guided by an intelligence much smarter than my own impatient curiosity. Time takes time, after all.  Or as I so often say, if patience came quickly it would be called instant gratification. Or convenience. 

The gospel reading this morning mentioned the second coming. And before the recovering Christians get too triggered, I do not think the second coming is an outer savior. I think the second coming is the birth of Love, the rising of compassion, and  the hard-won revelation of those qualities of Heart that have grown in the dark winters of life where expectancy was a dim glow and in which fear most likely burned more brightly than faith. I think every time we practice, pray, reach out, give of ourselves, laugh freely, and receive one another with care, we fulfill the promise of the second coming that is also inherent in the season of expectant waiting— Love lives.

Keep the faith. 

More soon.