Thoughts about love.

Love Endures

“To guide someone

Through the halls of hell

Is not the same as love.”

Gregory Orr

          I listened to Krista Tippett’s On-Being interview with John Lewis on NPR yesterday. It was recorded in 2013 during one of the many tours he led to Selma, AL to retrace the footsteps of the Civil Rights protestors back in 1965. He recounted his experience there when he and others were beaten and trampled by horses and driven all the way back to the church where they had begun. But what he mostly spoke about was love, and from what I understand about his life, love is how he lived. It got me to thinking about all the meanings packed into the word “love.”

          John Lewis said he and the others marched because they loved this country and they wanted to be part of it by being able to vote. That march across the Pettus bridge on the way to Montgomery was a “voting rights” protest. I also think the State Troopers who beat them and trampled them would say the same thing—that they loved this country. Lewis spoke of the training they had received in non-violence and how it had prepared them for the abuse they would receive. Those State Troopers received training, too; not in non-violence and not in the hate that was displayed that day, but in protection—in how to protect the citizens of this country. But they had not received training in how to love them. Years later, the man who was Chief of the State Troopers at the time of the Selma March, apologized to John Lewis, begged his forgiveness, and gave him his badge as a gift. Somewhere along the way, he had learned how to love.

          I just wonder how we define love and how we sort it out from something warm and mushy, to something hard as nails. Love is a verb, and it is strong and unchanging whether it is reciprocated, or not. Love can lift you up or slay you. It can cause you to endure even when it breaks your heart, even in the face of death. Love is a way of being, not a sweet and syrupy emotion. Love can come upon us when we least expect it and from the strangest places. Real love doesn’t wax and wane with the moment and is not subject to disappearance when things go south. Love endures as a constant through good times and bad. When we find it within ourselves, we are made stronger and yet more vulnerable by it. John Lewis had it.

          When I think of love, I always remember Mary Oliver’s prose poem, “West Wind #2.” Toward the end of it, she wrote, “There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe…” May both John and Mary walk in the light of the love they radiated. And you, too.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane