Feb 08., 2019   /   General, Soul Food, Updates and Activities

Love, Breathtakingly Ordinary

A reflection by Sr. Cecille Tuble, rc in Maryam Community for the month of February 2019:

A million years ago, when I was growing up in the 80’s, my ideas of love revolved around Barbara Cartland-inspired damsels in distress being rescued by stern, inscrutably attractive older noblemen, or their more modern equivalents in Mills and Boon novels. Later there were movie versions too:

Richard Gere overcoming his fear of heights to offer flowers and his undying love to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Love, according to these early guides, involved basically being a helpless girl without money or a future, swept off her feet and given, not only a lover/husband, but a whole new identity (of course connected to her man). Love was a once-in-a-lifetime romantic boon: there was only One. True. Love. Too bad if you can’t find yours, honey. Your life is a dismal empty solitude deserving the sincerest commiserations. In my twenties, I was too busy being a self-conscious intellectual feminist, and I thought, with arrogant ignorance, that the guys who pursued me were pitifully blinded by the illusions of romantic love. At that time, my early, largely-unconscious notions of love acquired a quasi-intellectual veneer, an odd and haphazard contradictory mix of adolescent romantic idealism and post-modern ideologies of the impermanence and futility of love. Needless to say, I was blind as a bat when it came to real, flesh-and-blood relationships. I couldn’t recognize love even if it sat on my nose and bit me.

Then, in perhaps the most enduring mystery of my life, I fell in love. With God. I was radiant, daring, bursting with joy. I would do anything for God, follow Him anywhere. Of course, in the early years of my religious life, I didn’t actually say this simple truth when asked why I became a nun. I was embarrassed by its unabashed romanticism, its quiet passion simmering over the edges. So I tried to hedge it with more intellectual and spiritual terms. But my journal at that time bore witness, and from time to time whimpered at my denial, like an aggrieved puppy.  God, on the other hand, being love and goodness Himself, patiently and tenderly stayed by my side as I explored this disconcertingly alien country called love. What made it so disconcerting is the fact that loving God pushed me outwards, towards the ones that God loves. And since God is incorrigibly indiscriminate in His loving, that meant He constantly called me to love those I found hard to love, those for whom I erected barriers of prejudice and fear. It was, indeed, a “school of love.”

Then the darkness came. And again. And yet again. It bore the name Depression, and like a ravenous ogre, it devoured the light and everything that I had carefully constructed which I called “self” and “life.” There were intervening years of being okay, productive, busy with ministry. But each time that dark monster came I fell apart, and I would lose everything, including a healthy self-love. And yet, paradoxically, even then, love stayed. Simply because God stayed. In my journal entry of February 2013 during one of those times of darkness, I wrote: “My God, my love, 19 years na tayo. Thank you. You’re the only sturdy, stable, lasting thing in my life, and I will follow you anywhere. Please give me the grace to follow you even if it takes me through despair. I know you won’t abandon me. ‘The thief of happiness,’ — that is what depression is called. Remind me, Lord, that You are my deepest joy.” And God heard and stayed and led me through and out of that shadowed valley.

And the God of love taught me this luminous lesson in the midst of that darkness: love stays. “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” St. Paul thunderously proclaimed to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13: 7). Love will always stay. But I must not look for it in fuzzy romantic feelings, or in ecstatic prayer, or in idealized “soul-mates forever” friendships. Love, in all its wondrous variety, is breathtakingly ordinary. 

Love is the symphony of spontaneous laughter at community meals, and love is the tearful, solitary confrontation in prayer with one’s sinfulness. Love is my two sisters, harried and exhausted, yet with careful tenderness, cleaning and washing our sick father. Love is doing that day and night, for months until he died. Love is Sunday pasta dinner, a walk under the stars, and a blue dress sewn with pride and affection. Love sits beside you outside the psychiatrist’s clinic, and reminds you to get a haircut. Love is a pair of gnarled and trembling hands reaching out in need, love is a banana offered by younger hands to the old. Love is a puppy, soft and warm and affectionate in your arms.  Love is Google Translate and cobbling together emails in Portuguese, love is a dog-eared French-English Dictionary. Love sits across you with glowing triumphant eyes, as your retreatant discovers, with tearful amazement and tremulous joy, that he is, against all odds, God’s beloved pala. Love, indeed, is breathtakingly, joyously ordinary.

In this vision, there is no such thing as unrequited love. One day, while I was recovering from my latest foray into depression, my heart stretched out its arms wide and declared: “I love him!” At which my mind yelled, “WTF?!?!” And what followed was a long battle, in which my well-medicated mind, afraid of a relapse triggered by unrequited love, alternately argued and pleaded, cajoled and threatened, all to no avail. My heart dug its heels, and after five months, won the battle. Throughout the years that followed, my heart would announce: “oooh, I love her! (sister),” “Yeah, him too (friend),” “Awww, and you (dog)!”  Finally, it dawned on my mind what the whole love-thing was, contrary to my early schemas (Mills and Boon died hard). That it was, after all, an overflow of God’s love, a love that heals and rejoices and is totally not into tit-for-tat. To measure love in terms of reciprocation is to narrow it down into a transaction: I love you, you better love me back. It is to shrink one’s heart into a calculating, miserly, airless cell, buttressed by fear. But to do so would be to miss out on the sheer joy of loving another, and the exhilarating freedom of loving without expecting anything in return. In other words, to miss out on God’s way of loving.

Taken from The Happy Puppy Site

The English poet David Whyte wrote: “We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.” To embrace a vision of life as permeated, always and everywhere, with God’s presence is to recognize love’s many visitations. There, in the ordinariness of conversation over coffee, of a text requesting or promising prayers, in the blithe breeze of a sunny day, in the wagging tail and adoring eyes of a dog, in the laughter of a friend at your corny joke, there blooms love. God’s joyous, creative love, breathtakingly ordinary.

Another poet, Henry Vaughan, speaks of this permeating love:

And here in dust and dirt, O here, 

The lilies of His love appear!

Open your eyes. Open your heart.