I watched the movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
"Do you suppose it's possible for us to belong to someone before we've met them?"
I have not understood the word "family" more than in the past few months; My family in Spain showed me a love so accepting that I felt myself growing into myself - I felt my old, learned layers of self-judgment and fear shed off as I was becoming more "me" than I'd been before. Likewise, more His.
Rachel once said, "being close to God is being close to who you are."
Being close to people who are close to God, likewise. Jesus lives in us, after all (Galatians 2:20).
Family, too, here in Baltimore. Gallery Church Sowebo has been family almost beyond my ability to convey. People have welcomed me into their homes, into their lives, into their hearts: and I've welcomed them likewise (sans a physical home to welcome into).
The beauty of hospitality and welcoming in two very different countries, with very different people. Families. Family.
I read Pope John Paul II's Meditation on Givenness in preparation to read Theology of the Body. All of everything - all things in existence - are gifts given by a loving God. Humans are the only creature in existence that can actually be a gift to ourselves. Not only a gift to the world, to other people, but we can actually accept our own lives and existence as a gift.
He writes about how we can have a kind of holy predisposition towards someone - someone that another person may find completely unlovable, we find to be lovable. This is a gift from God: we are seeing with His eyes.
Anthony de Mello in The Way to Love puts it another way: our disliking of others is only a result of our programming and what we believe to be "good" or "bad." So someone that we dislike or that bothers us - may be completely unbothersome to another person. This is a curse from culture: we are seeing with distorted eyes.
So whether you believe that humans are inherently unlovable and God gifts us with eyesight to love - or that you believe humans are inherently lovable and society curses us with eyesight to dislike - we come to the same place.
"How, then, shall we live?" What the heck is that from? Maybe this
. The phrase comes to mind all the time. As a person who often gets trapped in a cycle of thoughts and emotions (cue my favorite humorous Enneagram post, 4w5 human here) - I touch the ground in asking, "how do I live?"
Thoughts and emotions without actions will simply die with us, which is sometimes okay. Not everything in us needs to live on.
"I've seen the nations rise and fall I've heard their stories, heard them all But love's the only engine Of survival "
~Leonard Cohen, The Future
Holy crap I just looked up the context of those lyrics for the first time and WOW.
Moving along.
How then, shall we live?
Head in the clouds, feet on the ground.
All these idealisms gotta grow feet.
Hands, to serve with.
Somewhere, sometime
when we're able to
put down our notebook
and take up our Cross
to walk, walk, walk
alongside the broken
maybe we keep
it in our minds
and at our hearts
so we don't have to take
this painful, learning step
into action
where we can so easily
get it so wrong
"better to never step
than to step wrong"?
one theory
or else
"better the walking
than the standing still
waiting forever at the
crossroads of a choice
instead leaving only
options upon options"
I'm choosing
I'm acting
I'm living
And again the answer comes, "to live is Christ." Yet not I, but Christ lives in me.
People die. Love doesn't.
Many thanks and much love,
~Mia