Easter wings
“It is finished,” he said.
Not from a spirit of rejection,
but from a recognition of completion.
A full, embodied spirit-filled,
body-filled,
breath-filled,
and breath-exhausted,
recognition of completion.
I hung a black cloth on my door
yesterday.
Picking up a storyline from a year ago,
that flung out my hand
when I grabbed for pen and paper
to find doctors who could operate on me.
My second trimester pregnancy all of a sudden
making tragic sense.
So much is held in death.
So much is held in tragedy.
“It is finished.” He said.
An expression that Love has been birthed and manifested into its fullness. An expression that Love has been rejected and flogged from its fullness.
Real love is too much for many to handle because it means that that part in our hearts that we rejected to fit in, to be noticed, to find acceptance is actually loved and so our compulsive ways of living are no longer needed. No longer help but rather hinder. No longer love but actually create discord. And it means that by accepting Real love, I may be confronted with a profound loss of myself that I need to grieve and lament. But because I am in Real love, I am held, loved, nourished, begotten.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
— Conversation between Skin Horse & Velveteen Rabbit in Velveteen Rabbit
A few weeks back, we enjoyed an early dinner picnic to watch the nearby bunnies we had recently discovered. I brought my beet kvass, felt the fullness of a radiant spring evening and was thankful to simply be outside with my family. I watched as my son held out his hand and a bunny came forward. They had their own exchange of twitchy whiskers and velvety fur for a delightful squeal that encapsulated it all.
I chose to undergo my surgery awake. I wanted to be present for the birth of this pregnancy just as I had been awake for the birth of my son and the births of my previous losses.
In life, all I wanted to be and all I want to be is awake. Even if it requires facing loss. I want to be fully person—fully human.
Love gives all of itself—and at a certain point, there is nothing left to give—it has been given. It has been finished. The only other thing left is for a choice to be made.
But finishing one storyline and being open to another requires something of me—
Love requires all of me.
A full, embodied spirit-filled,
body-filled,
breath-filled,
and breath-exhausted
recognition of completion.
Love requires all of me.
All of my ways—dying to all of my ways—the good, the bad, the ugly. I have seen my ways. Someone who lives from deeply knowing their ways can only ever offer compassion, patience, truth in gentleness because the sight given sees the landscape of our tragic heritage of loss, of compulsive behaviors and the powerlessness we have on own our.
And that gift of becoming human from the One who knows his ways are not our ways and still loves us with that compassionate sight, thoughtful intention, and truth in love. That gift that graces you and me with life and love in the midst of our loss. Our loss of ourselves from hardship with Mom and Dad, with Sisters and Brothers, with what we needed to do to survive (or to try and thrive by finding our voice). That gift that graces both you and me with life and love in the midst of our loss.
That gift that we are then slowly, ever so slowly and gently changed by and changes all of our relating by.
I awoke with an excitement on Sunday morning. It was Easter and I remembered a year prior—feeling so strong and looking forward in time. So much healing happened while I was awake for the surgery. Though in time, my grief would settle in around the relational brokenness and woundedness around me and from me in relation to this loss. There is reality and there is metaphor and sometimes, life integrates both into one.
So much is held in death.
I find so much comfort in Christ because he is not only Love, he is also Loss. He truly knows what loss is. Which is why when dwelling in his spirit, in a contemplative, quiet manner, there is incredible (truly out of the world credible) solace and comfort. There is an intimacy because God is intimate. There is an intelligence, a communicative spirit because God is intelligent—Knows—and his spirit communes. God is personal with a name, a face, a hand, and a heart. A breath. And certainly tears. I can only imagine his loss for what he birthed and loved—a humanity that ultimately rejected him. Crucified him because his way revealed theirs. And yet, all he desires is a return. And a return means that we've seen our ways, we know who we are, and then we can be done with the "rupture" and get on with the "repair" and the recreating in a shared reality.
That black cloth was a tangible way of letting the death of Christ hold so much. And with the arrival of Sunday, I wanted to take it off—and make a wreath that acknowledged this new storyline from his coming back to life through the death from others: that Love wants us to return to Love to love. To love with the love we have come to know. My husband started in on a salmon frittata, and I took our little one into our backyard to gather some heather and stuff it into the bare wreath I cherish.
“It is finished,” he said.
The dysfunctional storyline of history, herstory, (familystory), done.
Done. Rewritten.
Recreated.
And the irony? The embodiment of love still was rejected from the lineage and history of compulsions and woundedness in humanity. Blindness that blinds. Self-righteousness that impedes. Willfulness that narrows and excludes a willingness. Judgment which hardens hearts no matter how ‘right’ that judgment is (and does so right under our nose).
The Christian life is precisely
a recognition
that I possess a spirit of rejection
that impedes completion,
a full, embodied spirit-filled,
body-filled,
breath-filled,
and breath-exhausted,
recognition that I impede completion.
Love invites me into that storyline—that way of life which empowers me to 'own my inability' in Christ's love which is then mysteriously the doorway into Love—into Christ and the freedom from a life resurrected in the present. I get the invitation to walk through a doorway each day and into a different reality where despair becomes hope, sorrow grows into joy, and death blooms into life.
True love isn’t dead—it is resurrected.
Lived.
