“Faith
is the bird
that feels the light
And sings
when the dawn
is still dark.
”
I have been thinking a lot about faith. And about love. This week I have travelled to attend a funeral to be with people who loved and cared for me many years ago when I was an exchange student. I have been thinking about how love lasts over time. How love lasts though loss. How we can’t measure love.
It can feel so exhausting and complicated at times—this life of ours. Where does one find faith? Where can one get renewed? Where are we supposed to put our energy? The world’s problems feel so big—and it’s hard to imagine the kind of love that is big enough to heal it, or even act as ballast.
And I have begun to wonder about love as something that doesn’t exist in amounts at all. It simply is: small or big. It is all the same. It’s a light. It’s a presence.
My host aunt, whose funeral I attended, let me stay at her house early in my consulting career. I stayed a week while doing a big project, translating interviews, writing a report and creating a presentation. It was a lot of work, and it was challenging work. And the whole week she took care of me in the most wonderful of small ways: I worked in her living room and she brought me cut up fruit for snacks, glasses of water. We had dinner together and watched tv at night. It was practical love, simple kindness. And I think of these acts now as seeds of love. Seeds of love that had lain fallow for years in the soil of who I am.
I had many years of hurt, and while I could recognize kindness, and I could show people love and I could act as if I felt it—I couldn’t feel kindness. I really couldn’t. When you keep yourself numb from hurt, you also keep yourself from feeling kindness. From feeling love. But the kindness, the love, wasn’t lost. They were seeds. They stayed.
I stood at the graveside this week, and the headstone next to hers was her first husband—who also had shown me much kindness. Had taken a week of his spring vacation to show me his hometown and region of Germany so he could share his love of his region—the food, the churches, the city walls and even a sip of the region’s wine. I could feel the gratitude with each breath. I could remember the fun I had.
And thanks to the good misfortune of my broken legs this year and the constant and non-judgmental kindness and care of my friends—the walls broke down and kindness and love could get in. And the seeds, that sat for so long, have begun to grow.
Love stops time. It slows things down. It cradles, it buffers, it holds. It’s light and heavy at the same time, like the best featherbed. Love is small and can get through the cracks. And it’s as big as it needs to be. Love is an element that is both effort and nourishment at once.
But I think it’s important to say that as small as love is—and as practical as love can be—love isn’t easy. I recall a lovely piece in Toni Morrison’s Paradise where she states that “Love is divine only and difficult always…And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma.” It is important to say that there is work, effort, a practice, in the giving and the receiving. It’s not instantaneous. It can take years. Love becomes. It deepens.
And love requires effort—sometimes laborious—but most often, constant. Being there. Again. And again. Showing up. Packing the lunch. The picnic. Folding the laundry. Raking the leaves. Feeding the birds. Sitting quietly or talking into the night—as my host cousin and I did the night before the funeral. Talking about love--the love from her mother that remains even with her loss. But most of all I could feel in the candelight of that night the love that surrounds us if you let it. The love that remains and returns, like the dawn, even after the darkest of nights.
© 2023 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD