Love Language
Dear Friend,
When you asked if I had received a letter from Love, I think I missed it. I wasn’t familiar with this particular practice, and just sorta answered without really thinking about the question.
Later, when I searched for and found a couple of your friend’s exchanges with Love, I better understood what you were pointing to. That you were simply asking:
When was the last time you wrote, not a love letter, but a letter to Love?
Have you dared to ask Love a question?
How has Love responded?
I want to believe I have been writing alongside Love since October, and maybe even before that. Your friend talks about waking from the surgery in which she was diagnosed with an incurable cancer, and hearing and feeling only Love, and recognizing how the voice of Love had simply overwhelmed the voices that often take up residence in her heart: the voices of “shame and bitterness and scarcity and insecurity.” I have a friend who calls these voices, and similar voices, The Crew. They sometimes go by different names, and maybe they are different for you - maybe different for everyone. But they seem to flourish in fear, and their goal seems to be the same: To separate us from God. From Love.
But there are times when the crew simply wilts under the weight of Love’s voice. This, for your friend, was one of those times.
Her story resonates with me deeply. Didn’t we talk about this in October? Didn’t you share your own stories of times, occasional and fleeting perhaps, that the only voice you heard was Love’s? I want to believe that you have had this experience and keep it in a safe place, and remember to go back to it when fear start getting thick and the voices start getting louder.
I remember waking from brain surgery and knowing, really beyond knowing, that I was not alone and I had nothing to fear. Not then, and not ever again. It was as if the tumor had contained all the fear, and it was simply gone - along with the crew of voices - and in its place was abundance. Love. As if the voices simply had no strength to speak. And this was not the first time.
Right after that happened, another friend had so lovingly urged me to savor this moment and suggested it would begin to fade in time. It wasn’t a warning, I think, so much as a sharing of her own experience. I imagine she knew that the voices never quite move all the way out. That her own experience had shown her that the crew members, knowing they could not be heard, had slipped into the tiny flat they shared on the edge of town and regrouped. Knowing that they were no match for Love, they decided to adapt. Changed their clothes.
She was right. Over the months, I noticed these voices begin to venture back. Mostly listening at first. Getting a feel for how Love speaks. Learning Love’s language. Love’s intonation. Love’s accent. Until one day they finally slipped off their oversized sweatshirts to reveal the new t-shirts they had been working on together in silence:
Listen, sweet one.
Don’t send us away.
We are also Love.
Your old friends,
The Crew
🖤 And then they rejoined the conversation, and it has gotten so, so noisy.
I haven’t had the courage to ask Love anything specific. Until now. And it didn’t go where I thought it might.
This, then is my letter to Love today:
Dear Love,
As I look back on the last few weeks and months, I cannot help but believe that, with all this surrender talk, you have been preparing a new section of our secret garden. Adding compost and sprinkling last year’s ground leaves and working them in - little by little. Patient as you are. Hopeful, as you are, that it will come to something.
I don’t have to know everything. But of course, Love, I’m curious, and listening. I hear a lot of voices telling me what this is all about. And sometimes the hardest thing for me is to know that the voice I’m hearing is yours.
Can you help?
In Love,
C
My Beloved, Curious, Seeker,
Sometimes, the hardest thing for you is not not knowing whose voice you are hearing, but asking for help. Asking is surrender. Asking is trust. Asking is courage. Thank you for trusting me. I will never betray that trust. Not ever. You know my name.
I want to show you the garden and every square inch of its boundlessness. The new sections and the old. The parts that I have not yet planted. The sections that produced so many pink peonies and yellow tea roses and blue iris and white lilies over the years, and sent them joyfully and selflessly off to weddings and funerals and all manner of celebrations. The parts that were overrun by thistles or simply grew weary and had to be tilled back into the ground, giving themselves to the next generations in a final act of surrender, but not a final act, at all, The annuals that sprout and bloom in a single season, with stock and sweet peas to remind people of the aroma of life and emphatically state that not all colors have yet been named. I want to walk the orchard with you and show you where the cardinals and bluebirds congregate in the morning to sing to their lovers, and would-be lovers. I want you to see it all. To smell it all. To hear it all. To feel it all.
I want to show you all that has been and all that is yet to come. Sometimes it’s hard, even for me, to wait until Christmas to give you your gifts. I want you to hold everything and always in the palm of your hand so that we can admire everything and always, together, and share stories of beauty far beyond and far nearer than your wildest imaginings. But for now, can your trusting take the shape of waiting? Today is day of waiting.
Because today, I delight in your growing longing to hear my voice. I delight that you are listening to me with your heart. I delight in your understanding that memory resides deep in the cells of all of your being - body and soul - and not merely in the cells of your brain, which will, and very soon in the context of eternity, forget what they know. But you will not forget. You do know, and you will know my voice.
You will always know my voice. In fact, it will grow ever clearer until you don’t even have to think about it.
Loyal Listener, you are right to ask the question. The crew is real, and the crew is clever and subtle. And sometimes it might be difficult for you to hear me above them.
But you will always be able to hear me. Always. And you will be able to recognize me. Don’t be afraid.
Firstly, you will know my voice by its patience. There is no urgency in my voice. If only you could see Time as I made it for you, you would understand that hurry and urgency are not what I was after. My gift of time was intended to offer you order - a visible horizon to which you might orient yourself - but never a thing to fear. Never a thing to consider scarce or empty and waiting to be filled. There is time enough, and it is full enough. I know and I promise, and when you hear, Hurry!, it is not me. Not my voice.
You will know my voice by my kindness, by its gentleness. When there is patience, there is no need of harshness. No need of pride or self-promotion. No need to prove my credentials or to undermine another’s. You will never hear me remind you of the times when you turned away from my light, or how you wore it better than another, or worse. You will never hear me keeping score.
I will never coerce you into my arms. The word fool has never, and will never cross my lips, even for those you are all but certain deserve the term - even when you think it’s you who deserves it. The members of the crew are shame merchants, and they are good at their jobs. They wrap up their wares in nice words like humility and justice. They will insist that they are being loving by speaking truth, but you will never see me delight in someone’s pain and never hear me suggest that:
“Well, they sorta had it coming, don’t you think?”
or
“It sure looks like Love is trying to get someone’s attention.”
If you hear that, it is not me or my voice.
It is not truth when they suggest that you, your neighbor, your friends, your enemies, even your enemies, are beyond my reach or that it’s up to you or to them to come find me. No, beloved one. I am with you. I am with them. Already and always. That is the Truth in which I rejoice, and I invite you and every creature to rejoice in it with me. That you are already beloved, and I am already with you.
That is the tone of my voice.
I do not quit loving because I cannot quit loving. I am Love, and Love is all I can be or do. I will never abandon you. I will alway protect you. And my voice doesn’t change with the rain. I don’t lose Hope. Not ever, and there is no despair in my voice. If you hear despair, it is not my voice. If you hear hope and courage, listen.
If I might go back to your letter, there will be harsh early frosts but I will cover you in warm blankets. Sometimes it will rain too much and sometimes too little. Sometimes the sun will beat on you and you will be unsure if you have enough to go on. I will be there with you. Protecting. Being with.
And when you hear a voice suggesting that if you don’t get your stuff together and soon, well, I might just decide to move on. That I might abandon the garden altogether or find another plot of land to cultivate. That is not me. It is not my voice. You know my voice.
Finally, and this feels important. You don’t have to stand guard against the crew. I am not telling you these things so that you will erect walls the crew cannot penetrate.
Don’t retreat. No. The crew is clever, and they will find their way in. To focus on them is to focus on fear. I want you to focus on who I am. Focus on my voice. And when you do, the voice of the crew becomes softer until you cannot hear it at all. The voices of fear and scarcity are revealed as frauds, and you begin to hear justice as I speak it - that justice is another word for my uncompromising and unrelenting love for every creature.
So if you dare, let the your carefully constructed walls crumble. Leave them behind and go out into the beautiful creation and be Love. Speak as I speak.
You know my voice.
Courage,
Love
So thank you for the question, friend. I don’t think this is the last letter, the last question I might have for Love. And I am confident that Love answers all of Love’s mail.
Oremus,
C
p.s. I cannot help but wonder what you asked, and what Love said in reponse.
I've listened to this 85 times.