In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

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I am feeling my way towards something here. Please be patient. You know what I’ve forgotten, and the trail is growing faint.

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Lately I’ve been riding the insomnia train again. Do you know it? I mean insomnia like, it’s three a.m., you haven’t slept for twenty some odd hours and you have to get up at six and go to work.

Insomnia always sucks but at the margins it becomes toxic. It hinders judgment, upsets the mind/body connection, and fast-tracks descent into depression. I wish it on no one.

One of the tricks I play to try and sleep is, I become a hobo. I wander around the house with a blanket looking for any open surface. Sometimes it’s a rocking chair, sometimes the floor beneath the dining room table, sometimes the back porch.

Sometimes I just wander.

The other night – huddled on the living room couch, shivering and floating on nightmares through fitful sleep – a question occurred.

To what are you clinging, Sean?

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Earlier this summer, I walked with Jesus to the river out back, knelt by a clump of Forget-Me-Nots, and begged him to heal me.

He trailed his fingers over the tiny blue flowers and didn’t answer right away. The sun was bright; the river a low hum to our left. In the distance, sheep bleated.

It reminded me of the time he intervened to save a woman accused of adultery. Do you remember? He knelt between the woman and those prepared to murder her with stones and traced circles in the dust with his finger. We talk about it now as if it were a neat and tidy wisdom lesson: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

But it wasn’t that. In that moment he was angry. And when he spoke, it wasn’t the words that made folks put their stones down. It was the fire in his eyes and voice. His was the authority of Love. He could’ve said anything.

“Sean,” he said gently, there by the river. “Forgiveness is the end of suffering. No one who clings to even one illusion will remember himself as sinless because he still cherishes this one error. He calls it unforgivable and makes it a sin.”

We tossed stones in the river then, lost in our thoughts. The afternoon passed in silence. He always liked that. I do, too.

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What, in the end, can you not let go?

Down in depths I cannot risk without the Holy Spirit (and even then, man, even then) the answer is: life itself.

I do not want to die. I want to live.

Beyond the drama and mundanity of my day-to-day existence, there is this drive to live. It eclipses everything.

Everything – what I eat, how I pray, who I love, who I will not in a million years love – is subsumed by – is forced to serve – the survival instinct.

And for which, in a nontrivial sense, God bless! I love this life. I love moonlight and grandmother stories. I love the sound of the river at night in summer. I love conversations that last lifetimes, and walking with you in the forest, and watching you turn towards me in certain shades of light. I love apple pie and fresh-baked bread. I love spider webs at dawn. I love kisses and Marianne Sawicki and hot coffee. I love being wordy and I love the silence that makes wordiness possible.

“And you would defend all of it to the death,” he says quietly, from the interior bower where he often rests.

Is that so bad? I ask at last. I hate disappointing him but like all good teachers he cherishes honesty. There is no helpful pedagogy without it.

“If you can cling to it it’s not love,” he says, and then goes silent for days, as if giving me time to get clear on – or remember maybe – a lesson he taught us lifetimes ago. Why am I so forgetful? What grief or loss do I insist on worshipping instead of Love?

Why is healing so fucking hard?

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Here is the truth.

I was not one of the disciples. Nor was I one of the ones with stones. I was the one telling the ones with the stones they were right. I was the one saying, she deserves to die for what she did.

I was the one saying, throw the fucking stones.

Sister, I was the one he confronted. I was the one whose confusion he so brutally and perfectly corrected.

I couldn’t sleep that night. All I saw was the fire in his eyes; all I heard was his clear and fearless voice. His was the authority of Love. For days I did not sleep or eat. Demons came, and devils with swords and spears of fire. Gehenna opened its gaping maw and bid me enter.

And knowing I deserved nothing but Gehenna, I fell to my knees and cried out from the ashen ruins of my heart, please don’t let me die. Please let me live.

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Sometimes when I am lost in the insomniac trials, you touch my shoulder and murmur, Sean, there is another way. Most times I don’t hear, but sometimes it echoes just so and I remember. You said it two thousand years ago as well.

“There is another way,” you said, and knowing exactly what you meant, I joined you and we followed it together. We gave up everything to follow him. And when we found him, a handful of villages down the road, I dropped into the dirt like a dog and begged him to forgive me.

And he laughed! Do you remember? He laughed. He laughed, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me on the mouth. “My brother,” he said. “Of course you are forgiven. Of course you are.”

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The personal existence passes. Life does not. The body and its stories pass. Creation does not. The earth will pass and the sun will collapse into itself and creation will go on.

We are creatures (critters, Donna Haraway says) of creation, inseparable from the cosmos which is our Creator and to which we bear witness in love, which is our creativity – our potential to be kind to one another, to feed and be fed by one another, to play together and walk together, to come in from the rain together, to laugh together and cry together.

To say to one another, Bill Thetford-like, there is another way.

“I don’t want to let all that go” arises from the mistaken idea that I am holding any of it in the first place. And that mistaken idea arises from the even more mistaken idea that I am something other than Creation.

I am a part of what I fear I am apart from. I can’t be let go. There is nothing to let go. Including – as you know – this personal existence.

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This summer, when we turned to go home, I picked two Forget-Me-Nots and offered one to Jesus, who cradled it in his hands. The other I carried home to you. This is it.