“Sometimes love looks like small things” -Tracy K. Smith
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong.” St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13:1-13 NRSV.)
Kindness is the greatest endangered thing.
And here you are, existing, your heart so full with it.– Nikita Gill from the poem “Your Soft Heart.”
In Australia, in a big church in a small town on the far southwest coast, the priest asked us to pray for the victims of the fires in Los Angeles. He was deeply concerned for that city, those people and all of the families and individuals impacted. Then he made a plea for human rights especially for refugees.
When I got home, I went to mass with my friend Teresa. The priest, who is from South Korea, included prayers for those families threatened by deportation. Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children, aunts, grandparents. Babies. Loved ones.
Which may be why this week, when I had my first Medicare wellness exam since turning 65, my answers in the mental health section were flagged. In the last four weeks have you been depressed? Cried often? Had difficulty sleeping? Breathing? Coping? I also checked the boxes that said I’d like help preparing meals, doing chores and cleaning my house. I mean, wouldn’t you? Apparently that’s not why they asked. To make matters worse, when the nurse ( a friend, this is the Haines clinic) took my blood pressure it was high. Of course it was. You would have to have a heart like a rock not to have it beating harder these days.
Yesterday was my daughter’s 40th birthday. A celebration. She was born in that same clinic on a snowy February 13th, 40 years ago. My second child. I like to tell the story, the blizzard, asking my visiting Mom if she wanted to come to the clinic for the birth and she replied that she wasn’t “present” (thanks to medication) for mine or my sisters’, so she’d skip this one too. The doctor had his Sorels on. The poster of a crazy cat clinging to a branch by its front paws with Hang in There printed on it that was pinned to the ceiling above me as I labored. It was funny. It still is.
But oh, how I loved that baby, completely, reverently. She was a miracle. Gilda Radnor said it—That came out of me? I still love all my five children in that stunning way I did the first time I met them. Biological and adopted. (I know them a lot better now in some ways, and less in others.) That’s the thing about love. It is both nature and nurture. And now there are grandchildren to love in a familiar, but brand new way.
I’ve been lucky to have a long happy marriage. We were what I’d now consider babies when we got married. We have grown up together too. Who can explain why it worked?
The default setting on my heart must be love.
My mother believed Valentine’s Day was a racket cooked up by Hallmark. As a child I wouldn’t have minded say, pink pancakes and little red velvet boxes of grocery store chocolates on February 14th. Balloons. So I did that for our kids.
I miss my mother every day and appreciate her more now that I’m kind of her age. I would love to hear her acerbic commentary on the news.
That is no doubt why when the doctor (also a friend, this is Haines) came in to check my wellness for Medicare asked if I had any concerns, I said I don’t want to die in six years. “I want to live longer than my mother and I’m worried that I won’t.” We both agreed that was a predictable emotion, and made some jokes, knowing that you never really know, and that deep breathing is more productive than worrying. I do know that love endures after death. You can’t reach the age of Medicare benefits without knowing that in your bones.
Dear Valentines, keep loving what you love, even more fiercely. And try, as a pastor I admire advises– to keep doing what you do well (we all have something), but up the ante and do it even better. It’s one way to drown out hate’s noisy gongs.
