Overture
Even in the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for. It does not always appear at first to be lovely but instead may take the form of a hot mess or a snoring old dog or someone you have sworn to never, ever forgive (for a possibly very good reason, if you ask me). But mixed in will also be familiar signs of love: wings, good-hearted people, cats (when they are in the right mood), a spray of wildflowers, a cup of tea. I wish the movement of love in our lives more closely resembled the grace of a ballerina, but no, love mainly tromps and plops, falls over and tiptoes through our lives.
One thing is certain: Love is our only hope. Love springs from new life, love springs from death. Love acts like Gandhi and our pets and Jesus and Mr. Bean and Mr. Rogers and Bette Midler. Love just won’t be pinned down. Love is Florence Nightingale and Coyote Trickster, who messes with us by way of his teachings about how we might possibly, grudgingly, awaken to the glory of life. Love is the warmth we feel in the presence of a favorite aunt, the kindness of a waitress, and the warmth of the hand that pulls us back to our feet when the loss of love has all but destroyed us. It is this stuff, which any kid and most poets will tell you we experience in our hearts.
Nonsense, you may say: love arises and is regulated in a part of the brain called the amygdala. How right you are, once again! And how happy that must make you, as it often does me, and why I so need the intervention of love. Do I want to be right or to have a loving heart? And will this be on the test? My brain also controls my breathing, but man, do I love my lungs.
On a ten-minute walk anywhere—from outside my gate with its broken latch to the loudest block in Brooklyn to Garbage City in Cairo—love abounds and abides, flirts and weeps with us. It is there for the asking, which is the easy part. Our lives’ toughest work is in the receiving. Love presents most obviously in babies and kids being cuddled, yet also as patience with annoying humans we live or work with or are. We feel love upon seeing our favorite neighbors and first responders, we see it in fundraising efforts, peace marches, kindergarten classrooms, gardens. When flowers don’t stir feelings of love in me, something is gumming up the works.
Love can be very scary. In fact, love is actually scary about half the time.
Men who were not shown love do terrible things in the world, and love shows up as volunteers, nurses, best friends. Love shows up with food and antibiotics. Love shows up with tea.
Years ago my friend Caroline found a small frog in a shower that was being remodeled, so she picked it up and carried it in her cupped hands to the wet grass outside. The frog was leaping in terror against her hands as she carried it, and probably did not understand the quiet comforting words she spoke to it along the way. I think this is one of the best examples of how love operates when we are most afraid and doomed, carrying us to a safer place while we pound against its cupped hands.
Three: Hinges
Seven drunken, stoned years after he died, I stood outside a door at a church on a hill in Sausalito, trying to work up my courage. The red door had an arch at its top. An arch says welcome. An arch says a little bit of holy. Inside was a nightmare waiting for me, thirty or forty sober alcoholics under fluorescent lights, drinking the swill that passed for coffee before the revolution of the late ’80s. But I had been visited by grace in its distressing guise of having run out of any more good ideas. I stepped through the arch into the fluorescent lighting.
Miracles rarely are lovely: a door opens and you go through, and God is not waiting there squealing with delight to see you, with leis and cranberry spritzers. You enter and you can’t even tell what you are seeing but you do know it is not good. People seemed to want to help me get sober, which was not what I wanted. I wanted to learn to stop after six or seven nightly social drinks. I wanted to wake up without hangovers. I wanted to be a person of integrity. I wanted all that, and a nice cool drink.
I walked to a table and sat down. I hated the hour I spent there, especially that I identified with every speaker; hated the women who came up to me like cheerleaders and gave me their phone numbers. But as I said, I had run out of good ideas. This is often necessary for grace to appear. Also, there were cookies. I hated it less and less over the next couple of months as I went back, and then I fell in love with it.
Getting and staying sober was the hardest work I’d ever done. I was scared and ashamed, defeated and defiant. Yet what those people gave me, and continue to give me decades later, remains the great gift and miracle of my life. They gave me me, they gave me a way of life, they gave me everything alcohol had promised. All miracles begin with a hopeless mess or bad news, and that was me, Exhibit A.
Four: Minus Tide
Sometimes it all just sucks, as Jesus says somewhere in the Gospels (although off the top of my head I can’t recall chapter and verse). Life becomes a lava lamp of memories of happier and sadder times, of what might have been, and of a fearful future, accompanied by the burbling sound of advancing time, of which one friend has almost run out, and of which I will too someday (supposedly).
She was very funny, brilliant, and highly educated, and turned out to be the only person I’ve ever known who is a worse know-it-all than my husband. I think she alone could have beaten him at Scrabble, and I’m glad she didn’t as this would have killed him, rendering him useless to me.
The other day when I talked to Tom about how some days everything sucks, his roommate, another Jesuit, was listening on speakerphone and called out, “Yes, Jesus was full of compassion for those suffering, but also says to look for hope one day at a time, to see that if the lilies of the field and the sparrows were cared for, how much more would we be?”
“That’s very nice, Jim. It would be easy if you were a bird or plant,” I countered.
“You have a choice,” he said. “What are you going to focus on, Annie?” he asked. “All the things that suck, or sparrows and lilies?”
I thought this over. “Can I get back to you on that?” As I’ve said before, I have a PhD in morbid reflection, and in a strange way it centers me.
She has a photo of herself with a walking stick on the reef at the last minus tide. She’s smiling. She was always beautiful and loved that about herself—she’d been a model as a young woman—and now she looks rather like some sherpa’s favorite grandmother in her wool cap and layers of warmth. What brought her here to this point? Well, what brought any of us here with her? An unimaginably complex and infinite number of intergenerational variables that made her specifically herself.
The theologian Frederick Buechner wrote: “The grace of God means something like: ‘Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.’”
Being at all, living, is a miracle, and—note to self—attention must be paid.
Six: Song
Life is such a mystery that you have to wonder if God drinks a little. How did my youngish, athletic friend get this disease? It must have been on a day when God was drinking tequila.
Nine: Fog of Love
If Bev had been a contestant on Why They Hate You, the panel would have focused on how she viewed her frequently expressed opinions on all of life as revealed truth.
God must have been very pleased with God’s self.
Ten: General Instructions
Maybe humanity is another synonym for God.
My staunchly atheist father taught English and creative writing to the prisoners at San Quentin in the ’50s and ’60s, and his humanity was a grace. He knew the prisoners were not free in this world, so he taught them another kind of freedom.
“A war horse comes upon a sparrow lying on its back in the street with its feet straight up in the air. “What on earth are you doing?” the horse sneers.
“I’m trying to help hold back the darkness,” the sparrow replies.”
“That’s absurd,” the horse says. “You barely weigh an ounce.”
“One does what one can,” says the sparrow.
As my friend Barbara wrote, ‘We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. It gets colder and darker, and then the morning comes.’”
These kids have hard lives and I would like for things to make sense for them. But there can be meaning without things making sense if we are kind and giving. Humane is what makes sense when all else fails. The nine-year-old girls held hands.
Coda: Glimmers
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
— Eugene O’Neill
I have quoted my own version of a William Blake line for so long now that I like to think it’s mine: We are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
My friend Father Terry Richie once said you have to learn not to have a broken heart after learning there are people all over this country who would volunteer to work for free in a death camp.
We are here to learn to endure the beams of love. “We” means humankind. Well, there’s the rub. That’s the fly in the ointment. The best of us can be raging narcissists, annoying, petty, misguided, and so self-destructive. What a sorry, scary bunch we can be.