So begins Teresa of Avila's prayer. No one really pays too much attention to the English language, except maybe lawyers...and they do it only to find the weak links in an argument. I admit I'm a sloppy writer. I wish I had someone to teach me how to do it better. Reading helps. But reading gets me all hot and bothered and then I want to write...and I don't learn very much.
"It's just the same 26 letters being rearranged..." A cute FB post had that in it. I dated a physicist once, not my husband, who made a slam against all the books I had and he was history. So my house is filled with mostly...26 letters...rearranged nearly infinitely. We are all both that simple and that complicated.
I've been try to write for days. I put words on the page...but the meaning is so hard to do well. First, there is my understanding of the word...second, your understanding of the word, third, is a kind of summation...on what your people agree that that word means...and then my people with their interp...and somehow we have to find a common ground.
Which is completely different that the way one communicates the word aloud. The choice of intonation, pause, reflection...changes everything. Should I use the phrase "I don't care." or "I love you," you will understand it perhaps differently than it was intended.
I can try to exclude from this people who are in love. Truly in love, not attending to some romantic fantasy, but love of its purest form. People who are 'in love' are indeed of one mind...and quite possibly one spirit. Do you get where I am going?
Jesus has always been talking about being in love with God. Now if God is in all of us, then it is not unreasonable to fall into love with everyone. Not a love that must own, or control, or necessarily be exclusive...but truly maddenly, delicious love.
But there are problems...at least for me anyway. It is not surprising to me that I would have trouble with love.
To be of one mind with God...and still be human...is definitely a kind of marriage thing. And to be a woman...I cannot help myself but to cleave to my beautiful spouse, to live for and to die for...and, in my case, to argue with. No good marriage can exist without the ability to fight well. Sometimes I think God is teaching me this more than anything else.
I am thrilled that we are bound together...and I am furious about it, too. There is a wild side of me that does not want to be tamed. It wants to run and jump and be just a little bit naughty now and then. It thinks about partying and casual romances...and it is annoyed because it knows such things will never satisfy my heart...ever. Such is the internal transformation that has been going on inside me since the day I was born.
God never closes the gate, never turns off the light. He says, as I'm running off to see what's on the other side of that mountain, "She'll be back." And I can hear Him say it as I'm running away, and that just makes me run faster...but I can't get it out of my head, "She'll be back." He just knows.
This is love. To let someone find their own way back into God. To be there, with the light on and soup on the stove, but to let them run until they are tired of running. This is love. The true freedom to choose love. To cleave to the One who completes me. And to learn to be happy about it.
Let nothing disturb you: all the activities of the world pale, turn to dust and are blown away in the wind...and that will not rattle you because you are God's alone. His love is sufficient for all things.
I know this, deep inside my heart. God has seduced me and I let Him seduce me. I have absolutely everything I need. I would not know this kind of sure love had not the world broken me so completely and tried to take me into its darkness. I see it more clearly perhaps, because I recognize that I have been forgiven much...and loved anyway. The logic of the world is so unimportant to God. Justice is nothing like what we think it is, neither is mercy...or grace. They are just words. God is more than words.
Yet...in the Gospel of John, God is the Word...see how our language fails us? God is the Word. Only one was needed. And we use so many...well, I use so many...
But He doesn't mind. He just stands at the gate...waiting for me to come home...
Love, Cindy
No comments:
Post a Comment