It's Just Like That

For the most part the west conceptualizes spiritual and emotional resources as a type of personal thermostat with the promise that with well-honed effort and discipline one can establish,fix and control the outcome and trajectory of most experiences. Imagined as such we organize our lives to get the temperature right.  We pour an exhaustive amount of energy into achieving balance, equilibrium and a state of stability. Small adjustments here, larger adjustments there.  The endless pursuit of control.  There is a whole world of unconscious behaviors, impulses and neuro-conditioning that gets organized around this desire for control.  John O’Donohue was right, “it is our minds that make our lives so homeless”.

  

It is a cruel, disorienting and finally a merciful realization that the life of the spirit is a weak force. Love is a weak power – and sometimes feels like no power at all. Maybe that is its strength.  We want control,love whispers “surrender”; we demand “secured outcomes”,love points toward the path of full-involved participation; we crave probability love sings of possibilities. 


It is the weakness of love that harbors the hope of our transformation. And so our falling apart is not mere testament of our frailty, there is also a healing within it.  As a voice from the east says, “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

A Crooked Mouth

Richard Selzer in his book Mortal Lessons: Notes on the art of surgery recounts a story of a young woman and her husband following surgery:  


"I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish way.  A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed.  She will be thus from now on.  The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.  Her young husband is in the room. He stand on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.  Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?  The young woman speaks, "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks.  "Yes," I say, "it will.  It is because the nerve was cut."  She nods and is silent.  But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute."  "All at once I know who he is.  I understand and I lower my gaze.  One is not bold in an encounter with a god.  Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works." 


An encounter with love is always though contorted lips. There is no other way to give or receive it. When I was young I marshaled my energies to achieve love under the movements of "acceptability" and various forms of "attractiveness".  But love would have none of it.  Now that I am older I see the twisted lips of my friends everywhere.  My salvation (and the worlds!) comes through the crooked mouth of love.