Confounding love
Advent, Week Four: Love
In order to reflect on what it means to wait in the darkness — and there seek hope, peace, joy, and love — I’m committing to write something here each week until Christmas. Consider this field notes on those four themes. I invite you to join me, in the darkening days of a Pacific Northwest winter, watching and waiting for signs of light.
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The springtime and summer that Andrew and I were considering getting married, we read a book together called The Means and the End is Love. It's a collection of essays on marriage, bound in unassuming card stock, and published by a young theology student as his thesis project. Filled with honest anecdotes and unapologetic conviction, it’s about as far from a how-to manual as you could get. And it's the only marriage book we really touched. (Apart from the wedding planning book a friend lent me which told me absolutely nothing about how to plan for a pandemic.)
According to the author, Kurt Armstrong, “Love is fundamentally grounded in mystery,” and I can certainly get on board with that.
At times, I have resisted love. Marriage has unearthed unconscious beliefs that I’ve carried with me for a long time… It’s revealed the conditions that love has come with. “I am loveable if…” and conversely “You cannot possibly love me if…”
The thing that I cannot get over, and probably will not (until death do us part), is that this isn’t how love works. Love is not so much a characteristic of our relationship as it is the landscape where we find ourselves. You are here.
A few years ago, I participated in a prayer practice called the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. There was no easing into this year-long “retreat in daily life.” It began with several weeks spent contemplating our “darkest dark” …the place where our pain or shame was so deep that we felt God’s love could not possibly reach us.
I remember how agonizing it felt to spend so much time dwelling in darkness (and meanwhile seeing everyone else around me pleasantly getting on with their lives). But what became apparent, little by little, is that God was indeed present in my pain.
“And if God’s love can reach you in your darkest dark,” my spiritual director noted, “There is nowhere God’s love cannot reach you.”
Andrew and I are quickly approaching one year of marriage. In this first year, it’s as though I’m learning this lesson of love all over again. Yes, in your weakness and your frailty, you are loved. Nothing can hinder love’s reach into the darkest depths of your life. And as with all mysteries, if you feel confounded you’re probably on the right track.
“But!” I hear myself protesting, “People are finite—we cannot possibly love without limits! Look at the divorce rate. Look at all the evidence stacked up against love!”
I stop myself. Is this love? Where can I look to find love?
Ah yes. There it is.
There he is. An infant at a woman’s breast, with lungs that were just moments ago filled with fluid and now take in cold air and a heart that pumps oxygen to tiny fingertips. Love in all vulnerability, love in the arms of human fragility.
When I look closely, I see that love is personal, intimate, and engaged. And when I step back and look up, there it is, too.
Love in the first breaths of a baby; love in the air we breathe.
