This is how I learned what I know about love in a sort of chronological order:
My mother taught me that love is a verb. Love is action. Like her, I’m one who has a hard time verbally expressing things close to the bone, and so, like her, I make love into things. My mother made love into clothing and presents and desserts. She made love into party favors and toys and fields trips—into clean rooms with matching bedspreads. From my mother I learned to love with my hands, to use love’s real power as fuel for good works, that love is impotent if it remains a mere sentiment. My understanding of my mother’s gift took some time to sink in. I wasted so much time panning for love’s gold in her words—dredging through the silt of verbiage for her approval and affection. It took me too many years to learn to read love and accept it in the form my mother chose for its expression. It was my own pride that refused love simply because it arrived in a shape of her devising rather than the one I craved. And so my mother also taught me that love comes in whatever form the giver is able to give and must be treasured for its intent alone.
From my father, I learned that love is security. Love is a safety net of irrational and unconditional approval, physical and financial security, and kinship. My father’s personal strength and capacity make possible my own forays into strange and sometimes scary places. He is my spotter. I can’t fall too far or too hard because he has the strength to catch me if I slip and I know that he will. I have no inherent, native courage. I’m pretty much a gutless wonder and so what small courage I have, what brief flights of faith I’ve mustered, are my father’s gift to me. I get strength as well from his blood that runs through my veins. My dad is a formidable man. A successful and intelligent and admirable man. In those many times when I'm scoured by self-doubt, I’m bolstered by the knowledge that I’m his daughter. And in those rare and precious times when hidden genetic linkages reveal themselves, I delight in our shared “tendencies” because I’m still so tickled to be his.
I am blessed to have genuine love for my siblings. I realize, as I move through life, that this is a rare thing indeed. My siblings teach me about “love of the same eye,” of seeing life through the same historical and genetic lens. In youth, we were co-conspirators. In age, we are friends. Their company is chosen, not mandated and I still find them as funny and engaging as I did when we were young. We are not a huggy or mushy bunch being raised as we were, but there is a hidden reservoir of trust we share—that there is precious little we wouldn’t do for each other. And so from my siblings, I learned the love of the pack.
From Darryl I learn the twists and turns, the comfort and delights of romantic love. Springstein’s “Tunnel of Love” is pretty much on target--the ride is risky and rough. We lay a faulty and vulnerable self on the altar of another flawed and fragile and very “human” being and we come with so much expectation and baggage. It’s a wonder that love ever works and that having worked, it can be sustained. Yet people keep trying. We prospect humanity for that perfect someone, a person willing to take that great leap of faith with us.
Darryl and I are yin and yang. We’ve used each other as sharpening steels. I’ve honed my identity on his intellect and acerbic humor and he has been shaped by the process as well. The ride has been, like Bruce’s tunnel, mysterious, spiritual, sometimes difficult, often ecstatic, scary, always sensuous, and thrilling.
I’ve always thought that ours was a lightening bolt romance, a love at first sight, head over heels kind of thing. Perhaps that was just my way of seeing its beginnings. But there has always been an element of magic to it, even in the hard times. We have chemistry. Even in those rare times when the space between us seems miles wide, there is an elemental part of me yearning across the chasm. We are as different as two people can be and yet we are necessary for each other. Darryl completes me. When all the flames of passion burn love to white hot embers, this is the love that lasts, that warms in the cold of age. Romantic love is magnetic. It is the love necessary to be whole.
I learn pure love from my children. My unabashed love for them is the unexpected prize in the Cracker-Jack Box of parenting. I would never have thought myself capable of this kind of selfless, unconditional love, careful as I am. And yet there it is. Proving God’s own formula--we can only love purely, that which we serve purely. I didn’t start out loving them purely. My love for them initially was the love of a new toy or pet. They each were novelties until that first time they cried and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was wrong or how to make them stop. My very struggle and anxiousness for them gave birth to pure love. My efforts to make a path for them, to make life meaningful and rich for them, to strengthen them in the face of life’s blows binds my heart to theirs in ways mysterious as they are absolute. Their happiness is essential to my own.
My love for my children is one of the real universals, a thing I share with almost every parent around the world. In fact, I think the main purpose for parenthood is to give mankind the tiniest taste of what God feels for us, a love freely given in spite of, and because of, all that we are. As my children grow older and more independent, as I see how illusory the control I have over them is and has always been, I find in my love for them, a partnership with God. I lean on Him in a very real way. My prayers take on a desperation and intensity they never had before. They are real things. When I ask Him to watch over my kids, I’m not really asking, I’m begging. My prayers are not just words and I’m not just being religious. I’m serious. And as I watch them struggle, again, there is an understanding of how it feels to be God. It is only natural that there should be this partnership, my children after all, are His children too. We are parents in this together.
From my friends, I have learned about love as communion. I make friends very slowly and very deliberately and so I have only a few. And they are the brave few. But my handful of friends represent all that friends are and should be. I am my best self in their company. They choose to see what’s best in me in spite of exposure to the entire spectrum. They are trustworthy confidants. They give true counsel and are absolutely kind. We laugh constantly. We gossip never. We don’t talk about clothes or what to have for dinner or where we want to go on vacation. There is no small talk, no silly inconsequential talk. There is funny talk and rich talk. There is very big talk at the heart of everything. Big ideas, big motives, big understanding. I am a person who can be alone easily and there have been long barren times in my life when I was without the right kind of friends, or when I thought I needed no friends. But good friends make life joyful and expansive. In rough times, good friends make life bearable. My particular friends are my handholds and footholds in this climb.
I have learned about love as devotion from my pets. My dog Scout loved me insanely. She lived to see me smile and followed me from room to room all day long. She licked my wounds and anticipated my commands. I could have drop kicked her across the street and she would have thanked me. My cat Yosha did the same. Yosha was my guardian angel in a catsuit and when he died, I was completely bereft. I’ve had many animals, all of them wonderful, but I fully expect to see these two sitting at God’s feet or perhaps in His lap. Having known animals, I can’t believe that God doesn’t have a very tender spot in his heart for them. It is easy not to know animals, their personalities are sometimes very subtle and their natures are not always open or kind. But I’ve found that most animals are mirrors for the love they’re given, and yet the love they return is a finer and truer love than what they’re offered. They are a balm and a poultice. They are comfort.
From a little boy named Irvine, I learned about charity—the pure love of Christ. Irvine entered my sister’s fifth grade class in the middle of the year when he moved from Mexico. When I went to the class to help out, I sat at a desk just behind him and watched close up as he struggled with the language and to make friends with the other children. He wore Sunday dress shoes that were too small to school and carried a kind of satchel instead of a backpack and visibly shriveled at the remarks and looks this drew from the other kids. I just loved Irvine. There was too much hope in his little face. He weathered the meanness of school with a bright and raw little courage. I knew Irvine was poor, but lots of kids in that class were poor. The difference was that I loved Irvine. When my sister told me he lived with his whole family in an unheated garage, I remember sitting at my window in the warmth of my cozy house watching the torrents of cold rain fall and thinking, “This is unacceptable.” It was simply unacceptable that Irvine was cold and poor and hungry and picked on by other children. It was unacceptable. It was a fact I could not live with. I didn’t want to help him because it is a commandment to love my neighbor, or to be more Christlike, or to accomplish the goal of being charitable. I had to help him because it was simply unacceptable to me that he was hurting. But there are millions of people in this hard world who suffer similarly. The difference is I loved Irvine. And that is how real charity begins.
I learn about the God’s love from the work of his own hands. We are commanded to know God and people go about this is various ways. I am an artist. If I want to know Van Gogh, I study his paintings. I know the man from his choice of subjects, from the way he saw them, and from the way he chose to express what he felt about them. I can read books other men wrote about Van Gogh, but if I want to really know him—get inside him—I study his work. And so it is with God. I can read scripture all day, and that has its particular usefulness, but if I really want to understand God, I have to go outside. God is the Great Poet. Our lives here are the most beautiful of poems and all the world around us is metaphor. I read God’s love and understand its savagery and tenderness in the workings of the weather. I understand the fruits and purposes of His love in bud and bloom and the changing seasons. I read His will in the quirky line of tree limbs and the grace of a comet’s arc, in the raw force of gravity and the delicate strength of spider web. I see His delight everywhere and sense it in my own delight. God made the world and He colored it green and blue and by this we know Him. I don’t particularly trust what men say about God. When I want to know about God, I go outside and look around.
This is what the world teaches me about love: it’s everywhere and it’s free. We stumble through this life knee deep in drifts of diamonds and yet we strain all our days after plastic baubles and tinny trinkets. Real love is as close as our reach, as easy to catch as opening our palms to the rain. It is the hymn we live in, the blood in our veins, it is our reason for being, what we’re here to learn and understand. God’s love is available to everyone just as sunlight is available to every blade of grass. And like the grass, our purpose is to use that love for our unique and particular growth and so make the world more beautiful and ourselves more able to bless it.
Karen's great Valentine to me!
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