These last couple of weeks, on more than one occasion, I’ve lost track of love.
The pain of collective trauma has ached in my chest. My hands have felt small and my voice weak as I’ve fumbled my way towards prayer. Perhaps “disheartened” would be the word.
As reports pour in of one family after another losing everything in these most recent California Fires, many of them dear people I know and love, my heart breaks in raw empathy. Simultaneously, my own family has been going through a ravaging fire of a different nature, one of the most harrowing passages of my womanhood, wracking my nerves and testing my faith on a daily basis.
In times like these it can feel like life is for the sole purpose of hobbling us.
And yet, a small miracle occurs every time I remember that regardless of my losing track of love, Love never loses track of me. In this sacred remembering, love is chosen once again, right now, right alongside everything else that is also present.
Our love need not replace our grief. The two can come together like two palms in a prayer.
It’s easy to choose love when our hearts feel wide open to life, when we are feeling relaxed and supported, buoyantly inspired, or poignantly connected to the pulse of existence, isn’t it? After beautiful lovemaking, or a delicious meal shared with dear friends, or a satisfying day of feeling useful in our endeavors, it’s effortless to align with love. When the children are easy and adorable, rosy-cheeked asleep in their beds; when everything seems to be in its right place, love is obvious. When we are reveling in the light of our own bounty, and in the incredible sweetness life includes, generosity of heart comes freely, doesn’t it?
But what about the moments when we feel utterly heartbroken by life’s relentless intensity; when all our survival issues are up, and it feels like we are meeting one closed door after another? When the unbelievable corruption and trauma playing out on our global stage gets the best of our centers, and we find ourselves writhing in a sense of powerlessness, then what about love? When we are personally feeling the toxic impact of natural and un-natural disaster, and can’t imagine how our children can grow up in a world like this, then what? When we are feeling painfully rejected, unchosen, or unloved by another, then where does love go? When we are feeling grief-stricken in faithless despair, completely betrayed or abandoned by God? I ask you—what happens then, to love?
There is a secret medicine in re-choosing love at the center of broken-hearted faithlessness. When our hearts feel demolished, and we have no clue as to how we will ever find our way back to some semblance of joy or trust, and still we align with love—what a powerful choosing this is. How revolutionary, really.
I’m not talking about being inauthentically loving, no. Not “putting on a happy face” or “keeping it positive.” Not a doing of “love” so as to appear more loveable. Please, please—no avoidance of what’s here in this moment in the name of “love.” I’m not talking about feeling love to the exclusion of feeling whatever else is genuinely present for us. I’m talking about finding it within ourselves to not let what’s devastating us distract us from the possibility of choosing love anyway—just as we are, and just as life is.
Life is inviting us to discover that resiliency has everything to do with realizing that we are LOVE, and that nothing is too much for love to bear.
I love you. ~*~
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