Living-Deliberately.com

I dreamed last night of a quilt. It was a patchwork, each square interspersed with a deep crimson red. The squares beside each red one held names and an embroidered image….a bee here, a Chinese symbol there, a book and sewing needle in another. I woke for a few minutes as the sun rose, when I typically start my day but with no urgency on this weekend morn, and realized that my mind had been compiling a fellowship of souls.

After a year of wandering, borrowed and confined living spaces, and a stack of declined invitations, we find ourselves in a home with a history of children and hospitality. In the early 1900’s eight children were raised within these walls and from there it became a home for clergy; after that a guest house for travelers. It is a beautiful history to become a part of, knowing that the walls speak good things, that people look at this house and smile. We want the door to be open, the home lights through the windows to glow warmly, and for faces to make laughing memories around our table.

I’ve been reading The Rule of St. Benedict and have paused all week on one line. “Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.” It has, for all intensive purposes, stopped me in my tracks.

Even now I struggle to put all the thoughts those words send spinning into something articulate enough to share. Memories come….of the days after our daughter’s death, when I’d refuse to answer the question, “how are you doing?” because I knew the asker was in no way prepared for the rawness an honest reply would give. Of the times I’ve let my shyness be my god and send me to the other side of a room so that I could avoid having to speak with someone who intimidated me. Or worse, the times I let pride be my god and avoided them out of arrogance and feelings of superiority.

There is more than memory, or entanglement in memory anyway, as I feel what the other side is like…to know what it feels like to genuinely be interested in what another has to say and then to realize that it is not mutual. More recently, to discover that while I may have very much loved and wanted to be led by someone, they did not even recognize the worth of my soul enough to mend a repair they themselves caused, nay to even recognize such a rent had been torn. How hollow their greeting would seem now…..

Into the spinning comes determination. Fresh renewal in hope that change is possible, and let it begin with me Lord. If the eyes are the window to the soul, I can direct mine into their’s. I can let love transcend words and connect on a deeper level. I can choose the eternal realm over the temporal one and give time. Time, which is surely our culture’s first idol, the primary reason we rush past the needy and choose hollow, shallow investment over depth. Time spent with another leads to an ingrained blending of lives, of souls, that can never really be teased wholly apart.

Which brings in those thoughts of listening with risk, of willingness to be changed by another’s impact upon my life, of allowing for my mind to change, of letting them become a part of who I am and I, a part of them.

Trying to define humanity is difficult. A person. A species. One definition comes to be by what we fail at. “Subject to or indicative of the weaknesses, imperfections, and fragility associated with humans .” Our human frailty. I found that interesting. It’s not our success or strength that makes us human….it’s our need. Our fragility. Our interdependence upon one another.

And I come back to that quilt in my dream, each connected to another. Each square, each soul, with a story that has delighted us in the telling and hearing. We’ve marveled at the vibrancy of the stories around us, of the accepted invitations that prevented the shallow from remaining and has instead helped us to hear needs and how we may meet them, to share ours and have them met, to each of us know that we are not alone. By listening, through time, with honesty and real love, we grant what surely every human craves…..the acknowledgment, visibility, and worth of their soul. Can there be any better way than that to follow Christ?

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed