All The Love, All The Time

In her excellent new book on the ebbs and flows of the nature of love entitled Somehow, author Anne Lamott wrote this fantastic passage about love lost and found and how love is the energy that moves us forward: 

Love's loss is the source of most suffering, and then love transforms the suffering into depth, compassion and the great painful gift of humility. I  never love this.  One day at a time, and sometimes one hour at a time, love will be enough to see us through, get us back on our feet and dust us off. Love gives us a shot at becoming the person we were born to be, not us on our tightropes holding our breaths as we strive for greatness (or at any rate not falling on our butts). When all is said and done, and against all odds, love is sufficient unto the day. 

This spoke to me so profoundly today.  I can't tell you how much I love how Anne Lamott writes; if you haven't read her work, you should. 

There's a thing that happens to many of us when we experience loss or when we are wondering why we have to go through heartbreak, brokenness, and trial.  It can feel a lot like weariness deep inside of us.  Or it can take the form of heaviness, like a weight on our shoulders. 

We carry this around with us sometimes for a season and maybe even longer. 

There are days when it feels like we move in a fog, and what love we felt seems to have fled; the energy around us seems flat, and we think the fire within has gone out with a last wisp of smoke and a hiss. 

But like Lamott says, "One day at a time, and sometimes one hour at a time, love will be enough to see us through..."  

I like to think of that power of love as emanating directly from the Divine, surrounding us like the air we breathe, permeating every fiber of our being with every breath we take.  

It's what keeps us alive, truly alive.  

Even when we feel it's gone, it's still there because we can't escape it. After all, nothing and no one can escape its presence--not in an ominous sense but in a comforting one. 

Our eyes must be opened to this to allow our hearts to receive its blessing.  We can't get there by willing it to be so, and we definitely can't get there by allowing the perceived loss of love to consume us. 

The world is full of impermanence, and blessedly so.  There is a cycle of dying and rising in everything and in all of us.  We might believe that when something or someone is gone, we have lost all the love we felt with them.  

We haven't.  It remains, and so do we. We can let what's impermanent go and know we have not lost ourselves or the love in the giving.  

There may be days when we bear our broken-hearted burdens, but they don't have to be borne forever.  We can set them down and know that some reasons we held on to them were pure but misguided.  And so we let them go, too. 

Then, when our hearts are ready for transformation, we should look up and around.  The love we long to feel is all around us and in us. 

It is even in others around us because they are breathing in and permeated with the same love, even if they don't know it yet.  I believe there will be a day for us all when we ultimately see that love, but for now, we do what we can to experience it as best we can. 

May it be so, and may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all, now and forever. Amen.