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My
father was not a drunk or a womanizer. Every night he came home from
work and had dinner with us: my mother, my sister and me.
Afterwards, he went into the den and sat down at his desk with its
multitude of cubby holes and drawers, and finished the work he
hadn’t completed at the office. The rest of the evening we didn’t
see him. I cannot recall a single time when he took me out to the
back yard to practice batting a baseball or to shoot some hoops. He
was not an unkind or abusive man; I think he just didn’t know how to
be a father. He was physically present and at the same time, far
away in a dark and distant land whose geography I could not fathom.
With shame I remember the angry words I flung at him like shards of
broken glass. In time we forgave each other. I understood how much
alike we were. I realized that he had done the best he could.
And so love goes. Many of us get the love we need, many of
us are left with half love, or fragmentary love, or futile regrets
for the love we could not give. It would be too easy to be bitter
and sarcastic about love. We don’t have time for that kind of
insincerity, that posturing. Love is too vital, too serious to be
treated that way. As serious as the beauty of the full moon when it
eases its way over the tree tops into the night sky; as serious as a
bomb exploding in the midst of a group of our soldiers as they
patrol the streets of Baghdad.
Can we rediscover love, forget the poisonous lessons of bad
experience and become unknowing? How do we cut through all the
sentimental nonsense, the platitudes, and the unexamined received
truths? If we are going to get this right, and, yes, we CAN get this
right, then we will need to start over and trace through this a step
at a time.
Where do we begin? Right here at home. With
ourselves. With acceptance. Acceptance of all that we are: the good,
the bad, the ugly, the boring, the admirable, the talented, the
funny, the wretched, the unfinished, the beautiful, the lazy, the
profound, the slapstick. To survey the full panoramic sweep of our
humanity; as flawed, angelic, and mysterious as it is. With
practice, our gaze can become steady, and it will all become more
familiar, the entire psychic terrain. We do this not for shame or
self loathing or pride of accomplishment. We do this for knowledge,
and in order to take the next step: compassion.
When will we stop expecting the impossible from
ourselves? All of the “should haves” and “ought tos” and “Why
didn’t I know?” and “How could I have done such a thing?” We are,
after all, human. We make mistakes. We fail. We stumble. The tragedy
is that we never have quite all the information we need before we
act. How can we? We aren’t God. That is why compassion is such a
powerful force. In the words of a Buddhist saying: Our sorrows and
wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.
In this journey to rediscover love, we must travel light and without
the burden of the past. We can’t carry with us the weight of all
that has been left unresolved. What did I want from my father? To go
back in time, to have the perfect childhood? What nonsense. We can’t
go back. And so the next step is forgiveness: forgive and drop the
weight from our shoulders. Forgive, to uncloud our eyes of the past
and to gain the clarity to see what the present and the future might
be. Another Buddhist saying: no matter how difficult the past, we
can always begin again today.
Acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness prepare us for
the next and perhaps most difficult step: humility. In the summer of
1999 Linda and I visited Zion National Park in southwest Utah.
There I saw the handiwork of a creative force far beyond human
comprehension; a gargantuan block of sandstone, with wind and heat,
cold and snow, rain and the diminutive Virgin River as chisels, with
a palette of thousands of colors and an infinitesimally leisurely
pace of creation that stretched over hundreds of millions of years.
Who was I in the face of all of this? That summer I learned what
humility is: a sense of the true ratio of human being to universe.
Humility is not groveling in the dirt or boot licking. It is rather,
a readjustment, a resizing so that we stand in our true proportion
to nature and the universe.
When we look up from our introspection, we see and hear
many familiar things around us. A few words overheard in the
checkout line, a friend’s latest risky romantic venture, a
conversation at the next table in a restaurant, the body language of
a colleague – we know these things, we’ve done these things, we’ve
been there. And so we have arrived at the next step in our progress
towards love: empathy. Well we could say:
Sister, I’ve been where you are. I know those tears. I know those
endless nights when sleep cannot be found and you wonder if it will
ever end. Brother, I, too, know the humiliation of being without a
job in a society that defines you by what you do for a living.
Brother I can tell you that your humanity, your worth are not
diminished one iota. Take heart.
How easy then, the next step – love. Once we have
arrived, how natural, how graceful it is, love as close as the palm
of your hand. Not so foreign at all. Not so difficult to understand.
Right here. With us. All the time. Now we see the importance of that
first step. We needed self knowledge in order to mark all those
places within ourselves that are points in common with the rest of
humanity. In order to accept the full range of who we are, we needed
compassion, forgiveness, and humility, spiritual values which lead
to empathy and love, values that we will need to rely on again and
again.
Now, whom do we love? There’s nothing complicated about
that.
In the words of the Stephen Stills song, “Love the One You’re
With.” Right where we are, right now. Wherever we happen to be.
For us this morning, it’s the people sitting around us; family
members, old friends, new comers. After we leave here, on the street
, at the public library, in the classroom, the office, wherever we
find people.
What do we do? As Mother Theresa said: “Small things
with great love.” Small things. A smile, a handshake, a hug, an
invitation to go out for coffee and talk some more, a card, an
email, exchanging books or CDs, offering a ride, a meal, a carefully
attuned ear ready to listen.
At a restaurant where I used to eat frequently, one of
the waitresses told me that she liked waiting on me because I always
thanked her for what she did. Is that an act of love or just good
manners? Every act of love is an acknowledgement of the presence of
another human being. A simple declaration of shared humanity. By
saying “Thank you” she is no longer invisible or part of the
wallpaper. She exists, she’s human, like we are.
Wallace is the tall African-American man working behind
the meat counter at the Fresh Market. He’s retired from the military
and the Post Office. Hair graying at the sides, a quick and ready
smile. Early on Wallace and I sidestepped the typical impersonal
customer-employee trap. One day I was in the store and went by the
meat counter. Wallace smiled and said, “What can I do for you?” I
responded, “Wallace, I don’t need anything. I just came by to say
‘Hello’” and I reached over the counter and shook his hand. His face
was beaming. As simple as that.
I work at the College of
William and Mary. Some years ago a colleague and I decided to have our own
employee appreciation day for the three African-American women who
work as housekeepers in our building. In their break room we taped
up a large banner that read, “We appreciate your hard work.” We got
each of them a bud vase, a rose and a card, and we bought and served
them breakfast. The oldest of the three, Novella, told us, with
tears in her eyes, that she had worked at the College for fifteen
years and no one had every done anything like that for her.
How sad, how very very sad. Not for Novella, but for the rest of us.
What are we so busy doing all the time that we can’t stop and see
the world around us? With cell phone in one hand and the other on
the steering wheel, where is it that we’re rushing to? The world is
all about us, humanity is everywhere we turn. We become preoccupied
by the daily-ness of life and worn down with the emptiness of
routine; we yearn for meaning, and there it is, on every street
corner, in the aisles of Home Depot, at the soup kitchen.
We might ask, what is the good of these small acts? Does
any of it really amount to anything? When we start asking questions
like that, we’re wanting to play God. It is not our mission to worry
about outcomes. Leave that to God. Only She can pull all of the
connections together and make things come out right. We’re not
capable of that. How do we know that those few words we spoke, the
cards we sent, the time we spent listening do not have an effect,
perhaps a profound effect?
I remember when I lived in Northern Virginia. My car had just been
totaled in an accident. The tow truck driver dropped me off at a gas
station. There I was, standing in front of a gas pump, not knowing
how I was going to get home. Seemingly out of no where, a young man
came up to me, and offered me a ride home, miles out of his way. He
was an Evangelical Christian and very much to his credit, not once
did he try to push his beliefs at me. He was acting on his faith –
helping a stranger. This happened 26 years ago. I have never
forgotten his kindness or his example.
Even with the most difficult of simple acts, the phone
call, the letter to the daughter, the parent, the friend, the one
from whom we’ve been estranged for years, the ones to whom we say,
“I’m sorry, can’t we try again?”, the ones who might well reject all
of our overtures, how do we know that we have not had an effect,
have not made a crack in the wall of resistance, have not started a
small revolution? We can’t know. It is not for us to know. It is
our job only to act. God will deal with the rest.
What an absolute blessing this is! Freed of worrying
about and calculating results and returns on our “love” investments,
we simply act, spontaneously, doing or saying whatever seems
appropriate or needed at that time for that person. All of our
actions flowing from an inner wisdom we didn’t know we possessed.
Who would have thought, when this journey began, that
taking the full spectrum of what we are, stirring and mixing every
attribute, like some alchemist of the soul, distilling and refining
through compassion, forgiveness, humility and empathy, into some
mystical essence that can flow just as surely through us as does our
blood, an essence that informs with love, every action we take? That
we so flawed, so imperfect, are capable of perfection in that
spontaneous unpremeditated act of love. Leaving behind platitudes
and received truths, what a visceral and transformative force it is,
and all of it so close, right in the palm of our hand.
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