People disappoint and hurt each other, and we’re also what we’ve got.
I was listening to a Jane Siberry song, “An Angel Stepped Down (And Slowly Looked Around).” It’s an interesting kind of song, in its way interrupting itself, looping back, nonlinear. It sounds like Truth embedded in conflict. The process by which Truth moves from revelation to articulation, messy and beautiful and confounding and never emerging quite whole. A story about flailing, seeking comfort, and receiving instead a challenge that would grow us to more than we are. A song as a myth, revealing a deep pattern that repeats and repeats.
There’s a line that keeps coming through the song, “I believe that love is the only thing that can heal us all.”
This is a belief that I’ve held and tested and found both true and wanting. I believe love brings us to our wholeness, and “love” is an inadequate word. Anything I say about it leaves out something important. Words are not enough, but they’re what I’ve got.
That love as ideal, as healing, has felt sorely tested and found wanting these past few years. What does it mean to offer healing love to those who do not want it, or don’t want it from us? Is it possible to offer healing love when there is an agenda beyond simply wanting the best for the other?
Deep, transformative healing takes time, diligence, and hope. We heal in relationship but we have to show up together striving and desiring that healing.
Having seen the scope of healing in an individual life, and the scope of the problems looming for us as a species, love feels like not enough but also all I’ve got.
In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to walk through several cities I’d never seen before. I marvel at the scope of them, the immensity of people, the depth and complexity of history. To change so many hearts seems improbable and perhaps a false goal, a goal that leads to tyrannical thinking. No wonder our most popular solutions keep looking like giving more and more power to a small number of equally flawed humans.
Not that I have better answers to the larger problems, only that we should listen to the voices that remind us of our humanity. Our capacity for love, our limitations, accepting the harm we’ve caused or benefitted from, slowing down, being with our feelings, letting the body and the heart pull us out of the whirlwind of mind and the clashing swords of ideology. To face our enemies and allies heart to heart, even when our blades must meet.
Love is not merely acceptance, though it demands that. Love is not always remaining sweet and kind under the barrage of contempt, mistrust, pushing away, or desperately pulling forward. Love is not always announcing harsh, violent truths regardless of another person’s mental and emotional state. Yet love encompasses these qualities. Love includes kindness warded with boundaries, and accountability softened by affirmation. Love is both firm edges and a soft center.
We may not be able to save our societies with this love, but it may be that in reaching for this love we find that which is worth nurturing and preserving while the garbage and rotting structures around us collapse and give way. We may find the strength to connect to our neighbors, to slow down, to be kind and direct. We may not change the entire world but we may change our own world, entirely. It does not feel like enough, but it’s what we’ve got.
