I was going to do a whole series.
It was going to be funny and deep. It was going to add to this blog, which has somehow metamorphosed into sporadic poetry, a steady voice, an anchor.
I was probably going to reflect on spiritual things, and the vast internet was probably going to be impressed. Its collective and virtual self would draw away from the glowing screen nodding in admiration at my groundedness, thankful for what my words had added to life.
Because, I mean, right?
It’s a good thing people can’t see how full of myself and irritating I am on the inside. I doubt I’d have any acquaintances, let alone friends. I’m not sure I’d even talk to me.
Lately (perhaps fortunately) I haven’t had much time to talk at all. Life got going after that first “This is Not Art” post. Family stuff, work stuff, all of it a lot, most of it feeling like too much. I tried to write at night and was too tired. I tried to write in the morning and was mostly flat and dispirited or — worse — pushing and impatient, trying to wring the words out and strangling them in the process. The whole thing felt like a chore, as things do, when my expectations for myself and life and everyone I know and the whole world and God, too, go shooting up like a rocket, leaving me back here on earth, dissatisfied.
I wrote only a little bit during this time of not-quite-chaos. Number 49 was the only thing I managed, and I wrote it mostly in an Airbnb in Pittsburgh that I’d rented last minute because my sister had COVID and we had to move my mom to assisted living, and I had two dogs with me…and…well, sometimes events converge and you end up in an Airbnb with a foosball table and the vaping paraphernalia of past guests floating in the couch cushions.
There’s a line from that piece that I’m remembering this morning. “Strong hands, wrinkled, pulling me up.”
I feel like that’s what happens, time and again. There I am, clinging to fantasy and wild expectation, like someone clinging to the leash of a giant, unruly dog. She’s pulled over, dragged along the pavement, knocked around until her knees bleed, and all the while she refuses to let go. Shouts, “No, no! This is what I want!”
But eventually, she does (I do) let go. And then, there they are again, strong hands, wrinkled. Pulling me up.
I felt pulled up this morning, so I thought I’d tell you about it. I’ll try to keep it brief. No ornament or expectation; things go better that way.
When I wrote that last piece, the “This is Not Art” one, I was trying to figure out what it meant to love God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my strength. I’d read those words so many times, without, it seems, ever considering them. And when I did consider them, I didn’t know what they meant. Not for real. Not in practice.
So I started with the famous bit, the one from Paul in I Corinthians. “Love is patient, love is kind,” and so on. I thought if that was love, the extended definition, then maybe I could take it piece by piece. I asked God to give me a patient heart and a patient soul. I asked it every day that I remembered, as many times as I remembered, until I began to forget, and life began pulling me over again, knocking me down, dragging me along.
I can’t say for sure if my heart changed or my soul changed in those weeks that I prayed that prayer. We’re pretty terrible judges of ourselves, I think. Or at least I seem to be. Far too harsh in some places. Entirely blind in others.
What I can say with some certainty is that there emerged for me a distinction between my heart and my soul that I had not understood before. My heart, it seemed, was the visceral, physical, now-ness of walking through life. When I prayed for a patient heart, my mind was drawn to daily things. A patient heart was what I needed for long waits at fast-food windows, for the woman in front of me in a slow-moving Chevy on a two-lane road, for myself when I deleted columns of data, and accidentally hit “save.” If these things could fall into my heart and my heart could receive them with patience, then I could be free to love people, and myself, and, God, and yes, even circumstances, just as they were, right now. Not wanting more or less.
My soul was something else. When I prayed for a patient soul, I found myself thinking about what is wrapped up in the future, hidden behind the clouds of tomorrow, next week, next year, all of which may as well be eternity, for all that I can see them. My soul was the deeper thing, the becoming thing, the who-I-truly-am thing. To have a patient soul was to live into that becoming and also to release it, to let the sense that all is well become knowing, and to find, in that knowing, a peace that is beyond any doubt, beyond the reach of all calamity.
And of course the words aren’t enough to explain it. And of course, I don’t understand anything, really. Even if I had the words to say what I know, what I know is a grain of sand, a droplet of water, a vanishing point on a distant horizon. Something that is, very nearly, nothing at all. Yet still, even so, I feel drawn to say it anyway. That, also, is a mystery.
But back to my story. Last night, after I’d held on to the leash and been dragged along; after my knees were bleeding, and I had succumbed to dark thoughts that nothing was well or ever should be again, there they were — strong hands, pulling me up.
I went back to Paul’s words and read them over, slowly. “Love is patient, love is kind.” “It is not self seeking,” or, put differently, “It does not insist on its own way.”
What does that mean, I wonder — to have a heart that does not insist on its own way, and a soul also? What letting go is that, and where does it lead you?
I think I’ll pray for that for a while and then at some point I might write something about it. But no promises as to when. This time, I’ll try to wait for the right time, patiently.
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