Instructions on Loving in Particular

Decide that God so loves this tragedy of a world and that's enough incentive for you to keep trying.

“Remembering how to love the world while still in the midst of our own evolution is complicated. We don’t need a resolute beam of positive thinking and encouraging chirps about silver linings. Those sentiments - a cotton candy theology of survival - melted long ago. You know this. You have likely earned it the hard way.

But what would it be like to love the world not in general but in particular? Pay attention, be mindful of loving this particular world and your particular people and your particular place and your particular self. Love is not cautious but extravagant and specific.”

from Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for An Evolving Faith (p. 130)

Photo by Ilker Uludogus on Unsplash

Instructions on Loving in Particular

First, stretch out, unfurl, you belong in your own life after all.
Untangle the antenna of your own longing, unknot your own soul's signal receivers. Shake out the dust, open the windows, bring along every you that you've been.
Next, become someone who notices your own life: the ringlets of their hair, the way your mouth quirks to the left, the delights of the unhurried stroll, the 
stubborn sunlight breaking through the storm's clouds, the unreasonable invitation to 
"love one another," and the little brown rabbit under the deck.

Then comes the day you realize that your hands have become 
your mother's hands. Perhaps then it's the unrepentant fuchsia 
of the tulips, the stack of books you plan to read 
someday, the first sip of coffee in the 
morning, or the unending rituals of closing down the house at night time 
picking up socks at the bottom of the stairs and loading the dishwasher and peeking one last time at your lanky children asleep and sprawled in their beds,
before gently closing the door in the practiced ways of generations.
Noticing becomes beholding, and this opens the door (oh heavens, 
let's just say it out loud) for love. Loving this, in particular.

Brace yourself for all the ways the world will creep into
your cracked open soul, the way that their sorrows will 
take up residence next to your own, neighbours at last. 
Feel powerless and small and ludicrous, sure, but keep whacking away 
at the powers and principalities anyway. Keep planting marigolds. 
When it is all generally terrible, hold the smallest good in high regard. 
Protect the part of you that still believes in faithfulness and your grandmother's recipes and the art of listening and the songs you still hum when you're sleepy.

Become disabused of any illusions of your own perfection, it will help you 
deal more gently with, well, all of us. When a kid knocks on your door collecting empties or selling cookies, give them all the empty pop cans and buy three boxes.
Speak generously and lovingly to your anxieties, to your stomach's geography of stretch marks, to your neighbour, to all of us who were trying so hard to get it right, 
to the version of you who thought that you had to earn God's love.

Collect goodness, treasure hunt for kind-heartendess, welcome earnestness and 
sincerity, love kitschy and basic things without apology. Be cringe like it's an offering,
be the one who jumps into the lake first, hooting that 
the water's fine so everyone else will get off the dock.
Explore the unlikely ways God is hiding in your own quotidian rhythms, and
become the lighter of candles when the darkness presses in close.
Forgiveness comes more easily when it turns out you needed it all along, too.

Double the cookie recipe. Learn how to bless that which has been disgraced: 
your desire, your hunger, your shame, your sickness, 
your stubborn belief, your absence of answers.
Believe in faithfulness and wild roses and phone calls. Decide that 
God so loves this tragedy of a world and 
that's enough incentive for you to keep trying. 

You'll soon learn that you can enchant your own humdrum days,
by paying attention to the sunsets above your own grimy street instead of 
the artful one on Instagram, by the crisp bite of apple, by the oft-told jokes, by the yearning in you, by the well-washed quilts, by the heartbreaks held and the
swapping of stories and the giving away of your money and
the ping of a text message check-in and the prayers of your breath.
You'll remember how it feels to whisper, "Thank you, 
thank you" even if you aren't quite sure why. 

In short, you'll need to let yourself love it all, 
all of it, all of you, all of us, again,
even though you know - you already know - it will break your heart.
Look, the first crocus is unfurling in the garden's still-hard ground;
good morning, good morning.

And finally, A Breath Prayer¹

Inhale: God, you so loved the world.
Exhale: Teach me how to love the world, too. 

Alongside you,

S.

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And in case you missed these recent Field Notes:

• Betwixt-and-Between: In which I make the case for your own moody, temperamental spring

• Answering your questions: Everything from prayer to church to raising kids on the spectrum to music and beyond

• As Easter approaches, I’m learning to embrace joy in ordinary life: The regular resurrections of our lives are just as miraculous as the big, showy, attention-getting ones

• Pressing on, keys in hand: Or, meeting a sage at my 45th birthday

• I used to belong there. I don’t belong there anymore: And a blessing for the combined sadness and relief of it

1. This is one of the breath prayers found in the Guided Journal companion to Field Notes for the Wilderness.