What love looks like

At dinner last Friday night, my young friend Rebeca asked the question “Do you make New Year resolutions?” 

My answer was, “No”

 No, I don’t write out a list of changed behaviors or desires for doing better at all the everyday things I resolve to attend to, whenever I make an assessment of my level of satisfaction, which I do quite often. Yes, I tell myself I can always eat more consciously (to lose weight), go to bed earlier (to be more rested and have energy to accomplish more), spend time writing every day (to keep inspiration and ideas flowing), organize and sort and prepare my living space for whatever comes next. But really, what I have resolved to do is to love enough to love myself — to love myself enough to make right choices. 

“Why do you ask? Do you?” I asked her.

“No, but I try to focus on a word for the year. I just haven’t picked one yet for 2019,” she said.

It was the sermon seed I needed. I now had the concluding question for Epiphany Sunday, January 6. The small community I serve is in the midst of collective discernment over what comes next for them. We had time later that day for looking realistically at strengths, skills, and resources to see them beyond June, when I will step back out of ministry. Since each week includes dialogue and discussion, it was easy to incorporate the question: “What is your guiding star? What ideal or value leads you where you want to be going?” I shared the riding inspiration on the ornament hanging above my desk: “Give me a heart of compassion.”

And yet, the question lingered—would it help to have a word to focus on this year? 

Like all seeds, this one sat fallow for a few days while picked up the practice of daily morning reflection time (not on a list of resolutions anywhere, but a practice that had been helpful last year, and, well, why not start again. It just happens to be in January.)

This is where I began reading, faith “is less a noun, a thing we either have or don’t have, than an action, a way of being. It’s fundamental energy pulses throughout human life and provides us with confidence to move forward, no matter what we might be feeling.”

I have been moving forward, as if there were any other choice. I have come closer to  accepting  sadness and loss as essential realities in everyone’s lives. I have the desire to remove the shadow of resentment that my life is harder than anyone else (of course I know it’s not), and accept the mantle of strength that has come from somewhere outside of my broken heart (or because of it.)

David Whyte, northwest poet with the imprint of rain and changeable skies from his earlier homes in Yorkshire, Wales, and Ireland, often speaks to my soul. In his book Consolations, I found my word. 

Courage. 

He introduces the word with its linguistic origins, the old Norman French, Coeur,  or heart.

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made. … Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.”

These last five years have been filled with love, tested by the necessities of being alive. Yes,  I have learned what I really care about. I live with courage. It is mine.