Today,
I had planned to write about Love, imagining an exuberant piece on
its joys and glories. But yesterday arrived and brought with it a
swell of sadness.
By
noon, work had taken me to a far~away mountain town to sit with five
grieving women and tell them that their beLoved coworker died, not in
an accident as they had been informed, but of suicide.
At
dinnertime, my husband and I joined our community in a memorial for a
five~year old child, offering what surely was scant support to
parents gripped by a cruel and jagged grief.
In
the evening, we attended a concert with a dear friend whose sorrow
over the death of his wife of 69 years has burrowed deeply into his
heart. And my father is just 13 weeks gone.
I
have no complaints about my day. I wished to be no place other than where I was. But yesterday's events shifted the focus of today's musings. It is Love amidst the pain of life that interests me now.
There
is a Celtic saying, “We live in the shelter of each other.” When
life’s harshness pierces us through, Love is often what makes it
bearable. Simple presence. Touch. Listening. Bearing witness, soul to
soul.
Yet
even when we're alone, Love is there, too. This morning, amid an
avalanche of technological problems that has me working from three
separate computers~~don’t ask!—I was primed for a meltdown. I
took to my cushion instead. I sat, stilled my thrashing thoughts,
opened, and was, finally, soothed.
It
was Love I opened to. In 1 John 4:8 we are told that God is Love.
That Love, though, is not passive. It is a Love that infuses,
envelops, holds, heals, and calms. God, as Buckminster Fuller wrote,
is a verb.
We
become expressions of that verb when we open and allow Love to not
merely move us, but to move through
us and out into the world. We drink it in in order to pour it back
out.
Even
when we don’t live up to this potential, Love waits. When I did
finally melt down during a disagreement with my husband, it was Love
that restored our bond and brought us back together again.
Love
shelters. Love envelops. Love soothes. Love restores. All verbs. All
Love. All Lovely, indeed.
Love, Love and more Love for you and your day!
Loanne Marie
