Making Room For Love |
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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
December 18, 2011 I don’t know about you, but I can get stuck in my ways. I know how I like to do things, I know how I want the day to proceed, I know what my opinions are, I think I know what’s important and what isn’t. There are ways of being in which I am comfortable, and there I prefer to stay. I like to be comfortable. There’s nothing wrong with comfort. Comfort’s good. Like comfort food: macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, warm bread, chicken soup. Like staying warm and cozy. Like being at ease in the world. Nothing wrong with that—except that sometimes our comfort gets interrupted. Something gets in the way: in the way of our plans, in the way of how want to spend this day. The flat tire. The illness. The child who gets sick at just the wrong time. The roof that springs a leak. The traffic jam. The flight that gets cancelled. The plan somebody else has that conflicts with our own. The “difficult” person who doesn’t do things as we would like them to do. You all have your own examples. Here’s mine. It was a lovely October evening several years ago when Amy and I lived in Cleveland. Our youngest son, Eli, was a freshman at Skidmore College in upstate New York. It was Parents Weekend at Skidmore, our first opportunity to visit Eli in his new surroundings. I played in a community band then, and our practice was Thursday night. After band, Amy and I got into the car, and headed for the highway. I had made a reservation for a hotel partially along the way, figured we’d get a head start that evening and finish the trip the following day. I remember the moon shining above on a clear night as we took to the road. The temperature was chilly but not unpleasant, traffic was light, we had about a two-hour drive to our hotel in Buffalo. At some point I might have noticed that the moon wasn’t visible anymore, then a misty rain began, and then I saw how the ground on both sides of the road had turned white and that the misty rain had become snowflakes. We entered the New York State Thruway and approached Buffalo: the flakes grew bigger and more frequent and then it was serious snow, and the traffic slowed. But our hotel was just a few miles down the road: we’d get there, claim our reservation, spend a lovely snowy night in the warmth of a chain hotel room before resuming our travels the next morning. We reached the exit. I was having a hard time seeing now because the snow was coming down hard, also because there was no light; I realized that electricity was off. We passed the hotel parking lot once, twice, because we couldn’t see it in the snow and then finally entered it in complete darkness—there was no light at that inn. So we decided to return to the highway, keep on going, outrun whatever had overtaken us. Bad decision. Traffic on the Thruway inched along for maybe a mile and then stopped. Completely. Nobody was going anywhere. It was about midnight. The snow kept on coming for an hour or so. Then it stopped, and everything was quiet. We sat in the car through several hours of darkness, then we saw the sky in the east grow lighter, then came the dawn, then the morning with only a few clouds in the sky, bright, cold, quiet. We waited; we tried to keep warm. There was nothing else to do. At about 8:00 am, the truck in front of us suddenly started to move, we followed and were led to an exit ramp, onto back roads chunked with ice, but we followed that truck which had Maine license plates—figured he was going the same direction we were. Ultimately, the truck turned off the road, but by this time we had figured out where we were on a map. We passed through small towns that were engulfed in snow, saw people trudging along the side of the road armed with snow shovels, got stuck at least once but other drivers jumped out and pushed us free. Then at about the country line—whatever county Buffalo happens to be in—there was no more snow. By the time we returned to the Thruway, it was a bright, beautiful October day, the leaves in full fall color. The only indication of what we had been through were squads of utility trucks going the other way, heading toward Buffalo: the posse riding hard to save the day. Being stuck on the New York State Thruway was not part of our plan for that weekend. Moreover, it was not comfortable. It was cold, and there was the uncertainty of not knowing when or if we would ever get free. But looking back, I remember that ordeal with some fondness. It opened up space in my life that would not have been there on a well planned and executed trip. I remember how beautiful the autumn leaves looked once we broke through from the snow. I remember the snow itself, how it sparkled in the early morning light. I remember the quiet that was present during the night and early dawn hours before traffic started to move. The whole weekend—Parents Weekend—took on a magical feeling: food tasted really good, and sleep came really hard, and we all just enjoyed being with each other. Stories of this holiday season are often about interruptions. They’re about things that get in the way of what we had planned. They’re about spaces opening in our lives, and the love that can enter those spaces. They’re about making room so that love can find its way in. We’re all looking for love, in one form or another. We probably think we know what love’s going to look like once we find it, but it usually doesn’t arrive in the form that we anticipate. It appears when we’re not expecting it, and maybe—as in the play we just saw—maybe looking like a wet, large, cold, hungry, pregnant dog. Here’s a funny thing about love: we plan for it, create strategies, work out business plans, claim control over the process—but all this effort often doesn’t work. Maybe sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t. We try to make love happen, and it doesn’t. Then maybe we stop looking, and: there it is. Why didn’t I see that before? The brilliant red and oranges of the autumn leaves, the light that sparkles off the snow, the warmth of a roadside diner breakfast, the gratitude for family—it’s always there, but we might not notice until space is created for us to see. Until we make room for love. In some theologies, it is conjectured that the reason we don’t find God is that we are trying so hard to find God. We are so busy looking that we don’t notice God is trying to find us. God is trying to find a way in to our busy, programmed, preoccupied lives. So to find God—or whatever God is for us—we are called to relax. Create space—open ourselves—so there might be room for God to enter. There is something to that, whatever we’re looking for: be it God, be it love, be it guidance for a decision, be it clarity on the next step that we are called to take, be it joy, be it peace. There is a role for plans and for assembling resources and strategies. But there is also a time to stop, listen, make room for whatever’s out there, trying to find its way in. And so during this busy season, we are reminded to sometimes pause, take a few deep breaths. Create space. Make room: make room for what’s trying to find its way to you. Pause, breathe deeply, make room for love. ● ● ● |
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