Nov 28 | Love will come (Letters from the Coast)

Love will come.

This pounds in my head ceaselessly like a song you can’t shake or an argument you analyze over and over, one that makes you imagine a thousand responses you never made.

Love will come.

I can’t remember the first time I heard it. It seems so constant and aggressive that I feel certain it has been with me since I was a child. But I can’t pinpoint just one moment where the indoctrination began, can’t think of one pure instance where I heard and absorbed that level of hope. One day, it was just there, insisting on its own way in flagrant violation of the rules. Hope this big has no rules.

Love will come.

It is utterly unlike the bloodless love of a TV sitcom dad, or the florid love of a teenager, or even quite like the fierce, unreasonable love of a mother. It is both harder than a diamond and more fragile than a body. It’s like an overripe tomato ready to fall off the vine and detonate on impact, spewing inelegant red guts and tiny seeds and split skin fragments all across the earth, refusing to leave anything unmarked by its kenotic enthusiasm.

Nothing could embarrass it into holding back. Nothing could drain its potential on the vine. Pick it and it will paint your hand instead.

Love will come.

Bits and pieces surfaced as if half-remembered from some earlier, pre-conscious time until 2005 on an early spring afternoon in St. John Maddermarket, a dark defunct church in the city of Norwich. In a totally conditional world where I had fallen far short of my own strongly held convictions about how to be an ethical being, the voice came without condition, with utter certainty – the only thing I can say with certainty, the only time when my certainty does not contradict my faith:

Love will come.

It came then and yet it didn’t, because that was only the beginning.

And of course, it also wasn’t, because really it was less beginning and more stopping to tie my shoe after a bad fall, more pausing and starting again.

I started walking.

I walked for ten years.

The voice came again and again: uninvited, unexpected, desired, demanded, refused, ignored, shunned, welcomed, embraced, and back again.

It came when I asked for it.

It came when I accepted the call.

It came when I took what felt like a ridiculous risk, and started seminary.

It came when I had no strength for it.

It came when my father died.

It came when others could not see it.

It came (and remained) when I could not see it.

Ten years.

Finally, I walked into a church and received four joyful burdens there: confirmation, marriage, convocation, and finally, ordination.

Love will come.

Love came for me. Love will come for me again.

And love will come for you.

Love continues through our own ignorance of her.

And at the end of us, which is likely much closer than we’d like to think, she will come, and remain.

Love will come.

I cannot believe otherwise, for if I did, it would be better for me to have never been.

I will lie down and die if I ever have to give that up.

Love will come.

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