The 1984 musical hit by the group, Foreigner, declares: 

                I wanta know what love is
                I want you to show me
                I wanta feel what love is
                I know you can show me. . . . .

All of us are foreigners in this world of form and matter, spirits inhabiting these bodies always seeking to know what love is.  I see it in my young granddaughter and her friends in high school taking up their life time assignments to give and receive love, to know what it is that they have been born to discover.  I saw it in my parents in their 90’s, holding hands as they walked to dinner, each finely tuned to the needs of the other.  And all the rest of us between our teens and our nineties; we are all foreigners still questing in this realm of love that constantly reveals its nuances to hearts that are open and curious.  

This afternoon I attended a CD Release Party for my friends, Robyn and Kent.  I mentioned them a while ago in an earlier post, and talked about their song, “Going Back.”  Today they sang all those songs on their CD, “Life,” then after a short intermission, they came back to sing some older favorites and some brand new songs.  There will be another CD and another party and more stories to tell.  Talking to Robyn about one of her new songs, “Bernadette,” I told her how moving I found the words to be.  She said she loves it too because it’s so simple.  Bernadette’s life story as told through this song brings to us the only message we ever need to hear:   there are hearts to be healed. 

Love, as we live and grow and mature, changes.  Love in our teens is the search.  We discover that we are loved by someone outside our family.  The special someone gives love to us.  We return that love.  From these early days of love through our middle years of growing in love, we are like a fire burning hot and passionate, then warm and steady and comforting.  We come to find there is even more beyond giving and receiving love.  Love itself becomes less about what we get and more about what we already have.  We learn that we are love.  That Love is our inherent nature.  Our maturing in love is about being stretched and tested and coming to know and trust the height and depth and expanse of our own capacity to be love. 

This is the answer to all of our questions about why we are here, what our purpose is, what it all means.  For all of us foreigners who want to know what love is, the answer is simple:  to be Love and give ourselves away over and over again and again.  To never be diminished, rather, to be ever more, Love.   There are hearts to be healed.

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The first thing you notice about her is her fiery red hair, then her captivating smile.  Her presence lights up a room and you know that this woman does not live life on the sidelines.  Delores lives in the middle of all that life brings with great passion.  Growing up on the South Dakota prairie, she and her family did not have material wealth but they were rich in family, friends, strong community bonds and church.  Later when circumstances changed and her life was more prosperous, this prairie girl never lost her community sensibility, her connections to family and friends, her generosity. Over the years I met her children and grandchildren, her indomitable 90 some year old Aunt Edie, Sister Jane Francis and other loved ones. We laughed and celebrated together, cried and mourned losses and hardships.  Delores takes time to attend mass every morning and has no time for phony people and pretense.  She does have infinite patience and love for everybody else.  She sees the best in everyone. Her connections are deep and long-lasting. Her hospitality is contagious.

• Joan Chittister in  A Monastery Almanac tells us that, “Hospitality is not kindness.” Rather, she says it is being open to the unknown, trusting the things that frighten us and extending ourselves to the unfamiliar.  It is a merging of unlikes.

• Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography writes about life in a small town in South Dakota and in many rural communities in the Dakotas, on the plains, and in monasteries. She believes that country people, like poets and monks can be thought of in the way Jean Cocteau suggests that poetry is “useless but indispensable.”

• Lynne McTaggart in her book The Bond: reports that we are hard-wired to cooperate, that theories about the survival of species through competition i.e., survival of the fittest, have proven to be wrong.  Enormous amounts of research show us how much we need each other. In fact, without a sense of community and belonging our health suffers and we are much more susceptible to debilitating disease and death.  More than all other risk factors such as obesity, poor diet, high cholesterol, smoking, overly stressful life styles - all of these have far less to do with our health and longevity than the connections we have with one another.

Hospitality is a need so deep that without it we would die.  It may not seem that way in places that offer many opportunities for employment, entertainment, education, recreation and more. There is an abundance of everything. Here in the Pacific Northwest many people believe that there is enough of all that’s needed to sustain life, no matter what problems global warming, economic downturns, and overpopulation may create.  There is enough rainfall and snow that we will never run short of water.  Enough farm land to feed a family or a community lavishly. A climate that allows for foods to grow year round. It never gets so hot that plants are scorched and dry up, or cattle starve because of meager grass or a few months later, a sudden blizzard buries them in snow. Here streams and rivers run full with fish, oceans nearby teem with food for all of us. Where all of our material needs are easily met, it is often possible to live independent, satisfying lives with little thought given to the rigors of survival in other places. It’s easier to forget how much we need others when life  has a steady beat and is full with resources and activity.  

In contrast, on the high plains where I spent most of my adult years, the fragility of life makes it that much more precious. There is not an overabundance of everything.  Seasons of plenty are short. Crops barely begin producing before a hail storm comes to beat them to the ground, even killing small animals who can find no shelter.  Winds swirl away scant topsoil along with grains as they are cut and harvested.  A hard freeze in early September can stop tomatoes on the vine.  Winter whiteouts mean no travel and never leave your vehicle if you’re suddenly caught in a howling blizzard. Winter survival kits stay in the trunk year round; the shovel and blankets may be called on when lightning sparks a blaze in the forest or when the car high centers on a country road turned to gumbo. The nearest town with a hospital, a motel, or a grocery store may be 3 or 4 hours away. Cell phone service is not universal.

These extremes on the plains foster a most essential hospitality.  When your car slides into a ditch on an empty stretch of icy road, you can count on someone stopping to pull you out.  They will refuse any payment, trusting you to extend help to someone else when the need arises. When the shelves of the grocery store run low in anticipation of a storm, neighbors make soup and bake fresh bread and share with one another. Everyone knows the elder shut-ins, the sick and lonely, and the struggling family.  Baked goods or hot dishes mysteriously appear at the front door, the walk is shoveled, mail is brought in.  On the plains where there is not enough of everything that is in abundance in the city, still there is enough.  The shyness, the reticence, the isolation of people in rural areas and small towns thinly covers deep wells of hospitality ready to be primed, to flow to the need of a neighbor or a stranger. Life on the wind swept plains depends on it. 

One’s own generosity is sparked to respond in like manner when one has been the recipient of the selfless gift of another. We are all like children coming home to warmth and peace.  Words may be sparse among country folk or on the plains but we are loved through actions.  Once we have been encircled by this degree of caring, it is hard to live without it.  We know what’s missing in places where there is enough of everything that appears to be important to the eyes of the world.  Where there is enough to live very well and independently, there may be little that draws people together in interdependence.  Ultimately we are all called upon to create our own community – wherever we may live - for without it the very quality and the length of our lives is diminished.  Our souls and then our bodies wither and die.  We have enough. We are enough. We can do it. We must. We need each other that much!

Our local library is a community treasure.  Out here in the eastern most ruralness of our county, it is a hub of activity providing a gathering place for readers, researchers, students, artists, knitters, poets, singers and dancers, exercise classes, political meets . . . . you name it and the library will likely provide space for it.  We are all known by our first names and we will probably greet a neighbor or two each time we come to check out or return an item.  Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of movies from the vast collection housed county-wide at one branch or another, linked by internet access and a request and hold system.  In the last week or two I’ve watched The Descendants, Barney’s Version and Hope Springs; all three suggested by friends who thought I would enjoy them. 

I did enjoy them and found, though the stories differed, the theme of each movie was the same as the others.  If you have seen these three, you may – or not – agree.  Maybe it’s just my quirky sense of connecting the dots and making meaning of things, that interjects itself into most of what I see or hear or do.  Anyway, all three of those movies appear to me to be about our need to be touched.  To be touched at our deepest core by another.  To be seen and heard no matter what our outer self may be demonstrating.  No matter what our history may have contributed to creating, that looks like our lives.

In a tiny volume, “Stillness Speaks,” Eckhart Tolle writes that true listening goes beyond mere auditory perception.  In true listening there is alert attention, a sense of presence, in which words are being received but are secondary.  They may be meaningful or they may make no sense at all.  Much more important than the words we listen to is the act of listening itself.  That space of true listening is one in which we meet another without separating barriers caused by our conceptual thinking.  Here the other person is no longer “other.” Here, in this space we are joined into one awareness, one consciousness. 

Perhaps you have experienced this consciousness.  It isn’t a permanent state.  But once we have experienced it, once we have abandoned our own limitations – even for an instant – we have merged with the divine.  It happens when we are truly present to what is, not consumed and distracted by what we wish it to be. Sometimes it happens more easily in nature, in the presence of inspiring art or when we hear unforgettable music.  In our human encounters, when we see another – or when we are seen – in this way, the love between us is contagious.  It is unstoppable.  It ignites an unquenchable fire that transcends time and space, that transforms the worlds within and the world without.  It is a holy instant.

I wish for you and for myself many “flares” of holy instants.  Can you imagine 7 billion flashes of Light connected across our planet, unlimited, uncensored, spontaneously and eternally fulfilling Divine Order. Could the darkness survive? The Light would bestow upon us the gift of acknowledgment, of belonging, of being seen and heard as Love itself.  

postscript:  I sit writing in a comfy chair opposite a sliding glass door, looking out across two greening pastures.  A small stream that originates in the hills to the east separates the pastures and flows along into the south fork of the Nooksack River.  To the south, beyond the furthest pasture, a tangle of wild woods takes over and reclaims the land.  Just as I finished writing these reflections and poem, the lower layer of drifting gray clouds gave way to a brighter, higher shape of a masculine looking face, angular and strong.   This face softened into the curves and smile of a feminine face. A holy instant happened for me. . . .

            YWHW, the male figure of god, the Creator
            Sophia, the female essence of god, known as the Wisdom
            together in one seamless, formless Being,
            as ever it has been and shall be forever

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