I think that perhaps the greatest gift of love we can give is to simply allow ourselves to be the beloved.
How long I've been peering down this dark hole, I don't know. But for days now, I keep circling back to this line from the movie, Magnolia, spoken by the character Donnie Smith. At what seems to be his last moment of desperation, as the rain pours outside, he cries out, eyes aflame, desolate: "I have a lot of love to give; I just don't know where to put it!
I just don't know where to put it..."
I think often about what an old friend wrote as her only interest on her Facebook profile:
I love people more than anything.
I have a deep and poignant memory sitting in Rembrandts', four good years ago now, light streaming in, colored by the stained glass, looking across the substantial table, doing everything I could to keep from standing up, bolting out the door, avoiding the tears that pressed hard against the banks of my lashes. "You have a lot of love to give, Heidi," he said. The thought had never crossed my mind, let alone my heart. Who, me? Lovely and lover?
Fast forward to October 2008. I got in my car, parking lot empty, all the parents come for their children, sun setting above the mountains. My heart was so full-- I was swimming in the reality of all this love pouring out of my old, fragile heart. I was making friends with a self long buried under the rubble of rejection, confusion, and hurt. A self left behind on some Christmas morning or under the kitchen table early in the morning.
I had long forgotten what it felt like to love and in its place was a habit of shameful begging.
Last spring, my eyes began to focus on a few clouds that have been set upon the retina for a while now: I was aware of a presence of a deep love for people that I fear can never be properly received. It is there, soft and red, but held back behind elephantiasis skin. The connections are somehow always broken. And so I keep it to myself.
I've been wondering about needs. What are needs, what are things that we just want, and what are the things that are absolutely essential to our deepest being? I have a hard time intertwining the things that bring the deepest, most brilliant doses of joy with those things that are also my deepest needs. It takes a lot of work to open my heart to the thought that this kind of abundant-life sort of goodness is also
essential to my existence. Goodness as a non-negotiable in our experience of actually
living? Could it be that joy and a goodness beyond comprehension is actually built into
the way we were supposed to live?
I am wondering how long I've been living out of the belief that to give love is an imposition. Something beautiful and good that was placed in me before the beginning of everything got twisted somewhere along the way. This longing to love, to give myself, to know and be known, to share all the beauty I see in the world with someone else, got relabeled as some sort of inappropriate demand upon those I ought not assume any connection. Something got mixed up in this broken heart of mine and I began to believe that this deep and good desire for companionship was an unworthy gift that is not mine to assume. The little lies began to sneak in,
how selfish of you to demand the time and attention of others. Who do you think you are to ask for any commitment or attachment? Your desire for friendship, for community, has little to do with your giving and all to do with your taking.But the eyes set upon my heart are changing these past weeks. How foolish, how misguided to believe these things. The love got buried. The joy in giving and serving and simply being with those the Father has given got trampled by the million rejections, the broken pieces that no longer know how to connect. The truth has gotten lost.
And so, I am wondering about a way of loving that is not often spoken of. Could it be that the best way of loving one another, the most valuable gift we can give, is to simply allow ourselves to be the beloved. Is it possible that we need to turn everything back around and stop pretending like we have to take care of all of our needs alone, in isolation, and begin to allow ourselves to need the love of others.
Because I think we have an innate need to give
love-- and when we close off our hearts and stop receiving it from one another-- even in the frail and broken and shadowy forms in which it often must be given-- we kill something in one another.
I wonder if community, if connection, if intimacy is a sort of reciprocal operation, a literal dance of give and take in which both the giver and receiver is simultaneously brought to life.
Perhaps the deep ache of our hearts today is not a matter of too little love given, but too little love received. I don't pretend to imply that either position is easily taken. To take the posture of the receiver is to put ourselves at the risk of loss. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently says, "To love anything at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken..." I think this is equally true of allowing ourselves to be loved. It is a precarious bridge we walk and must somehow trust, even when the construction so deeply resembles our own inadequacy, that to allow our raw and bleeding hearts to touch another is worth the pain and risk of separation and failure.
And how long can we continue to hold out our loves before our arms tire and our ears bleed of rejection. How many thousands of time must we hear the words, "It's not enough," or "I don't have time," or "I can't pay you back," before we stop offering, tired and frustrated? How do we resist the lie that living a life of love is just to good to be true-- not for me. I must muddle through without expectation. A lone reed.
Truth be said, I don't have the real answers to any of these things. How does it all get fleshed out, I don't know. But perhaps the first step is asking for eyes to see and a courageous, softened heart. Maybe it is a matter of realizing that if I follow my need
for love deep enough I will more accurately discover a need to
give love without fear of the hardened hearts upon which it so often shatters. Perhaps we need to stop preaching demeaning sermons to ourselves about the need to muster up more of this love and begin simply to ask for soft hearts to receive it.
Maybe this is what John meant when he said "We love because he first loved us." We can stop thinking of love as something we have to do to balance out the equation in our needy relationships and come to terms with the reality that
we are worthy of a life defined by a very deep love. Maybe then our relationships will escape this rigid economy of equal payment and enter into the reality of a more fluid abundance. We can enter the reality of a simultaneous flow of love where we are both the giver and receiver.
And I realize so much of this sounds so lovely and simple and logical and easy in writing. But the truth is that my heart is still deeply broken. I do not know how to enter this reality. I don't know if I can handle another round of the disappointment that comes from a door shut in my face out of fear. I'm not sure how many more walls of your heart I can hit before this cut begins to bleed.
But I do know this-- the thing I need is a place to put all of my love and that may mean that I must find the strength to keep trying, to keep knocking. I need you, not for what you can give, but what I need you to receive. And you need me too-- not because I can fill your empty places and patch up your voids, but because my smallness, my weakness, and my mere presence is the ground upon which your need to stretch your legs and run the race of love that keeps us all alive is met.
