I sometimes doubt my ability to truly love. Is it love when characterized by transaction and routine? Is it real when we return with a sense of duty & obligation more than genuine desire?

I realize that this paradigm, desire, is only one facet in which we experience love in our lives. I mostly call on God when I speak of love. It’s a strange world we enter with these words. The ancient Hebrew tradition had many names for God – and some openly acknowledged that they couldn’t describe or name Them. Some refused to inscribe a full name to God, instead adopting “G-d,” to make room for their inability to fully know. Some regarded the name of God as so holy that once it was written, it could not be erased. And there are some, like me, who try to connect with God and Love as a means of fully living. I don’t quite care what we call It, most of the time. I’m a shitty evangelist, and barely a Christian, but there are times when I realize that the resistance I experience is more than material. Love is a spiritual matter.

So this writing will focus on just that, Big Love, the kind that you can’t forget nor erase nor fully know, in hopes that it again reminds me of why I say that I believe in It, and love God, and my neighbor as myself. I hope that it reminds me of why I call myself a Christian. And I hope it brings me back.

First Love <3

I was born into a family and a place that held me as dear. And those early relationships, where kind humans held me and blessed me and knew me, well before I could ever do anything to deserve that care, somehow still holds me.

If one recognizes that God is Love, then I emerged into an abundance of It as I entered the world. And if I think back to this early embrace, I am both encouraged and ambivalent. It is both near and far – like a dream you must awake from and nearly forget as you open your eyes.

Two people loved me in a special and enduring way: my grandparents, Carolina and Baltazar. They are like that dream, though with them, I can enter back into it with some effort. A threshold exists within their memory – situated between this place and wherever they reside.

I didn’t have a name for God then, but I knew love with them. I knew it to be both intimate and transcendent. My grandfather taught me to be playful. We would ride bikes, push each other around, go out for Dairy Queen Blizzards, and enjoy simple things. My grandmother taught me to nurture. She pressed bandages into my ashy desert wounds and tended to a lush garden while my brother and I searched for earth worms in her cool soil.

My relationship with them was a kind of conversion – an initiation into a faithfulness to one another. If it was God among us, in the space between us, binding us together, then God is the witness and testament to a promise I can’t always see.

This kind of love isn’t dulled by time – but it can be hidden. Like entering dark rooms, I don’t recognize some places. It is hard to trace the image of anything. Everything changes with time, they say, but what about when you cannot make out anything familiar and near?

This is the work I am engaged in now. To reach out into an unfamiliar darkness to try to find semblance of familiarity. A hand, perhaps. I have some faith that I will be surprised. In the same way that small animals know to chase the distant rush of rare, cool streams in the desert, I know there will be blessings, soon.

I did not know then, when I could hold them and be held by them, just how rare cool streams are in the desert. When I am lucky, once or twice a year, they flood into me in vivid and overwhelming dreams. They burst forth through some unknown canyon – a kind of welcome trauma. For a week or two or three, they are the only thing I think about. I again am acquainted with the taste of tears and feeling of sore eyelids.

But seeing love like this in my daily life, allowing it to permeate into lived experience – this is an immensely difficult task some days. And it stirs in me much doubt about who I am, and if I can ever love that big again. Who welcomes trauma? Who asks for floods?

Love, Now

An ex recently asked me: where is love in your life right now?

The question felt like a condemnation. For months around that time, people around me called me out on my tendency to hide myself. I sung softly. I placed my dating apps on ‘Pause.’ I bought a ridiculous amount of houseplants. I visited home only when I had to. I had sex with people and didn’t want to see them again. I didn’t recognize the person I became on the rare few dates I did go out on. I broke up with people without ever really talking to them about anything, disappearing just as quickly as I appeared in their lives. Encouragement began to sound like an insult. I was indeed hiding from my own life.

To connect with people. And know them. And love them as I myself have been loved. This all felt like too much. Both to receive and to offer. Nobody is interested in that anymore, I’d tell myself. Leave it for the dreams.

I stumbled around his question, giving a passionless answer about how much my family and my community meant to me. I knew that he felt my half-truths. But his eyes were much too soft, his smile too endearing, and so I admitted: you know I have trouble getting there.

To be seen is to be loved, they say. Luckily, I suddenly find myself surrounded by people who have an ability to penetrate my defenses, deftly and earnestly, and insist on seeing me. My ex is a lawyer, and well-versed in the art of examining. He offered, “you just need to make space for someone who can dig.”

I think I need people who insist. I think it is good for me.

One such experience in insistence is a liturgical choir I joined last year. For nine months, we showed up to a stain-glassed and high-vaulted sanctuary. We sung old choral music in Latin, German, Spanish, and Anglican chant. We donned vestments and lined up before an altar to receive communion, week after week. The experience claimed me, saw me, and received me. And most of all: I saw them. And gave to them.

It is an immensely intimate experience to be in a choir. You may think you can hide among the masses – but you absolutely cannot. There will come time where you must sing and be heard. The edges of your robe will overlap with others. You will sweat and make mistakes and have disagreements and people will notice when you are not there. They will ask “where have you been?” earnestly and with full hearts. They will learn your name and, on your birthday, they will make you a cake and sing you the most intense rendition of the happy birthday song you have ever heard. You will learn their names, too, their stories and their lives.

And you will pray for them. This was the most shocking part of this experience. I found myself praying for people I had only just met – people I did not quite know. I prayed for them more than I ever prayed for myself. I wanted them to heal, to know love, to see that they were supported. In small ways, I gave myself to them. I was scared and often doubted my meager offering, but I kept coming back.

I think that God insists. We may not always be prepared to see Love in every outstretched hand, or the honest question about how you’re doing, or the compliment about your voice, because our egos get in the way. “They’re just being nice,” we say. But God is there. Reaching out over and over and over throughout the day. In small kindnesses and big ones, too. In perfect harmonies and in tonal disagreements. God insists on residing in the space between us.

And so, just like I chose to join this choir out of a strange but natural inkling that this is the direction I should head, I am now also choosing to love as generously and curiously as I have been loved here. Over and over and over again, people reach out to me. God reaches out to me. I only wish I could have seen it as that sooner. No more hiding, no more pretending that I don’t know who is actually there. In the place that we allow ourselves to be seen and loved fully is the place that God resides in us. It is the place from which we create. It knows no fear, and everyone you’ve ever loved or been loved by also makes their home there.

We attempt to meet each other here in small ways. Our own offerings to one another, our attempts to show kindness and connect, these are also to be regarded as sacramental. Meet a stranger’s eyes, softly take in their outstretched hands, and watch them loving you. And then try your best to stand still and motionless before their bright smile, their encouraging word, their song sung just for you. Good luck, because I think They like to dance.

Is it love, then, when we show up to the dance tired and weary? Do we still love God when we feel like we’re going through the motions, passionless and robotic? I can’t judge what brings us to the altar of presence with one another – but I know that once I hear the music, and feel the swaying, and God grabs hold of my shoulders and excitedly welcomes me back, I have to honor that as real. I don’t quite care where this occurs – be in it a sanctuary or a gym floor or a bar or a grocery store or a school hallway. I’m starting to see that this Love comes from everywhere. God meets us and invites us to sing and to dance.