Tag: love

Why Wait?

Rachel Henry2 Comments

My life would be a lot easier if impatience were a virtue. Or if I could learn patience faster.

Recently, I’ve been telling myself to buckle down and do more of approximately everything. Myself and I have had this conversation often with no discernible results. So for Advent I decided to stop trying to figure things out and wait and listen instead. This may be what some people refer to as praying.

Our culture doesn’t particularly value waiting, and after two weeks of practicing it, I understand why. The first couple of days you can feel all la-dee-da and enlightened about it, but beginning day three it’s just not fun. The subtitle on the Advent reader they handed out at church says, “Waiting in joyful hope.” I’m not sure where the joyful hope people are, but I’m hanging out in the annoyed get-it-over-with-already camp.

Today I decided that two weeks is quite enough time for God/the universe/whatever to have straightened out my life and revealed at least the next few steps in a clear, concise road map. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, God/the universe/whatever doesn’t appear to be on my timeline, despite my having told her/him/it very sternly in the car on the way home that I’d had about enough of waiting.

But here’s the thing, the point of these four weeks is for people to make a straight path for God, not the other way around. We’re getting ready to celebrate a birth, and though I don’t have any kids, I’ve attended enough baby showers to know that requires a lot of preparation.

Once it happens, your life, as I understand it, does not get easier. Suddenly your time is no longer you own, and this tiny being has the power to disrupt your sleeping and eating and showering in ways previously unimagined. It also has the power to open up a richness and a depth of love that little else can provide.

So that’s what we’re preparing to celebrate, that opening of love in our lives. I suppose it might be worth waiting for.

Running the Universe

Rachel Henry3 Comments

I have an atheist friend who always wants to know what I gave up for Lent. This combination of question and questioner is one of my favorite things in the world.

I don’t enjoy failure, so I don’t choose things like chocolate or sweets. Plus, I don’t really believe in the utility of suffering. Instead I give up an attitude or action.

This year I gave up being worthy, meaning earning God’s love. I think this could translate into non-religious language if you thought about earning being alive. No matter what you do, you can’t make yourself somehow good enough to have deserved coming into being; it’s all gift. I soon realized not being worthy also had to go because it gives me a reason to refuse that gift.

Letting go of worthiness is one step in my ongoing attempt to recognize that perhaps I am not running the universe. It’s risky, though, allowing God to try her hand at this particular task because clearly omniscient and omnipotent have nothing on me.

I confess I haven’t gotten very far. I like being in charge, and it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control if my actions are filling up some imaginary scales that will determine how nice God is to me.

My main practice has been remaining mindful of these few lines in St. Romuald’s Brief Rule for Camaldoli monks, “Remember above all that you are in the presence of God.” The rule goes on to suggest being, “…content with the grace of God,” which takes earning or controlling anything out of the equation. I sometimes translate the first line into, “Remember above all that you are in the presence of infinite love,” which helps me trust God a tiny bit more.

There are two more weeks of Lent, and my odds of achieving enlightenment by Easter are low. I’m not sure I’ve even given up enough control to fill a mustard seed. But occasionally I remember to stop and imagine myself surrounded by God’s presence, and in those moments, the world opens up and out and offers a sense of another way to be.

In case you’ve lost count, God, I think I’m at thirty-seven moments—approximately.

Stop Thinking So Much

Rachel Henry5 Comments

If I had stuffed the ballot box at the Academy Awards, Hugo would have won best picture. It reminded me of all the things that matter: magic, dreams, love, belonging, persistence, hope, purpose, creativity. All in two hours.

I have recently spent a lot of time thinking really hard about complicated stuff. It can be fun. It sometimes makes my brain hurt and hopefully helps someone in some way. But I don’t believe even the clearest thinking will ever cause the type of transformation that happens in Hugo.

A brief synopsis without spoiling the plot: a young boy’s tenacious search for love renews several lives and brings some magic back into the world, the kind of magic that helps us understand why kids need to believe in Santa Claus or convinces us to clap to save Tinkerbell’s life.

It’s difficult to believe in fairies as an adult and even more difficult to admit it. Growing up is a tricky business. Real things like mortgage payments and having enough to eat take a lot of our time and energy. Bigger real things like war and global warming can dwarf stories and imagination, which may then seem so small as to be not real, especially if we rely on logic alone.

The movie works because it takes you out of thinking and into a world where dreams come true if you hold on tightly enough to what is important to you. I think this world is as real as any other, but sometimes it slips our mind because dreams often don’t come true and many people never become what they were meant to be, or at least so it appears.

I forget all the time, like when I arrive at work on Monday morning and realize it is only five weeks until The Visit that follows The Report, or when I have, for the umpteenth time, let taxes, sleep, procrastination impinge on my writing schedule. But our forgetting something doesn’t mean it’s not there.

So go see this movie. Because when you leave the theater or turn off the DVD player, you’ll remember what lifts your heart up, and whatever that is will cause greater change and more joy than all the thinking in the world.

Spiderman and Red Cellophane

Rachel Henry1 Comment

My dad has always been my most faithful valentine.

He and I share certain challenges with punctuality and housekeeping, which gives me the handy excuse of genetics. He sometimes calls on my birthday to say, “I’ll stick your present in the mail tomorrow” or leaves an envelope under the Christmas tree describing a gift that has yet to arrive.

heart-shaped box of chocolatesBut when it comes to Valentine’s Day, he is always on time. Every year of my life, I have received a red, heart-shaped box of chocolates. The Russell Stover my sister and I looked forward to as children came wrapped in this fabulous cellophane that turned the whole world red when you looked through it. The invention of the Internet gave Dad instant access to See’s, a serious improvement in chocolate quality if not in packaging.

The card in the box of See’s says the same thing every year, “Happy Valentine’s Day. Love, Dad.” I love the consistency. Some might call it repetitive or unimaginative, but I find it reliable and comforting.

As happens to many chronically single people, my attitude toward Valentine’s Day fluctuates. Some years, such as this one, I get in the spirit and hand out Spiderman pencils at work just for fun. Other years I sequester myself away from the adoring couples whose faces might end up buried in their shared pasta dishes were I allowed out in public. If forced to confront this romantic bliss, single people often recover by watching the beginning of Oliver Twist over and over again, the part filled with misery and endless, dreary, gray days.

During those ill-disposed years especially, the box delivered to my doorstep saves me. Inside awaits a pound of chocolate that speaks of solid, unwavering, male love, not the kind splashed across the store aisles and television ads, but one I know will abide, year after year.

Thanks, Dad. I love you. Many unsuspecting, pasta-sharing lovebirds thank you, too.