Love is patient. . . Love bears all things.
—1 Cor 13:4, 7 Love can be understood as a kind of space, a spaciousness with room enough for us to be our whole selves and for others to be who they truly are, not the cardboard images we have of them, the 2-dimensional pages of them we bind, fluttering, as if in a book. We can become no more than libraries if we’re not careful—shelves full of the books we think other people are. But ideas we have of a person are not that person, and even if they were we couldn’t read them. Every person is written in their own unique language. Perhaps what happens as relationships grow and mature is that one person trains the other to read and understand and even speak their own unique language. Under the best of circumstances, this is extremely challenging, both the teaching and the learning. I think of my children as I write this. For years, I thought I was teaching them to speak my language. Now, during their adolescence and young adulthood, it has become clear they were demanding I learn theirs. I try with all the might I can muster to learn. Still, I’ll never be able to read them. They are not actually books. It’s an imperfect system, conceptualizing people. We store them like favorite or despised literature within the stacks of our memory, catalogued by preference or under duress, depending on who we are or who we have to pay attention to. Honestly, it’s probably more loving not to store people at all, at least not for long. Love suggests it is better to know people where they become real, holographic with light, dynamic with depth and weight and substance. We visit them where they come to life in the sacredness of their space of being, where perception—the unique language of encounter—is something they offer us out of their own self-understanding. What a lot of work this requires! Listening, resisting the impulse to interpret or judge or butt in with my ideas, waiting for them to come forth with more of who they are, listening more, practicing more impulse control, and on, and on. Above all, receiving a person in truth requires patience. It means waiting by their door until they come to fetch me, inviting me in to learn from them how to hear and know who they are. It means, until I am invited in, I must wait for them. No matter how long it takes or how frustrating it may be to wait in the hall, it means I don't pick up the book I have of them and read. Karen Jessee
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Where do ghosts live? Movies suggest the ground. It’s narrow there, where molecules cluster tight in the cool truth of dirt, rock and water. Perhaps air exhilarates too much. The pale puff of ghost dust which each of them are might be at risk of becoming, themselves, dusk. Even ghosts with their periodic forgetting have attachments which keep them tethered-- too much a mind to let go, insufficient else to remain yet clinging always to earth, diving back into the ground where bodies go. Karen Jessee |
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