Dec 24 | What does love look like? (Letters from the Coast)

What does love look like?

It looks like Lily, who I met at the bus stop on my way to my second service of the day several weeks ago. She was beautiful, Indigenous, full of light and laughter, with purple lipstick and a snakebite piercing and a puffy jacket. She sat down next to me and started talking immediately. I must have been wearing purple, because she said it was her favourite colour. She hugged me, asked me how my life was going, said hers was great – she had a good man and it was a beautiful day. Said man was a ways away from her, standing near an older man whom she said was his father.

I got on the bus with all of them…and watched her do the same thing to the woman she sat down next to. Hugs, smiles, laughter like they were old friends, even though I could tell they had never met.

Before I got off the bus, I leaned over and told her, “You have so much love in you. It’s just shining out of you, it’s so awesome.”

What does love look like?

It looks like the volunteer who comes to visit one of the residents at St. Jude’s, who is endlessly patient and kind and rather proper…until she starts speaking in a truly flawless Donald Duck voice, which makes the resident laugh. She says all kinds of things – mostly it’s just a game where the resident requests said voice, and, in the voice, the volunteer says, “No. Uh-uh.” Or she might recite a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

The resident, a 70-year-old German woman who has seen more pain in life than anyone should expect to, laughs and laughs.

What does love look like?

It looks like playing ‘Duck’ (a card game similar to Hearts) at the dining room table just outside of North Plains, Oregon, with my best friend’s family, the winter night thick and dark and quiet all around their little farmhouse, sharing cider and homemade molasses cookies and stories.

Later, it looks me, my best friend, and her mother gathered around the piano and paging through the hymnbook singing songs.

It looks like that uneasy and beautiful mix of tears and pure pink-cheeked delight on the face of another St. Jude’s resident as she turns to see an unexpected friend arriving for a visit and shouts her name.

It looks like the valleys below an airplane I’m riding in at dusk, filled to the brim with a muted blue light.

It looks like three women who live or previously lived at Hineni House arriving for Christmas Eve services and staying late to help tidy after our potluck dinner, dancing and giggling in the kitchen.

It looks like my husband gently persuading me to go to our friend’s new years’ party, even though I would literally do anything else in the world, and later sitting up until 3am with me and talking about all of our thoughts and fears and struggles and dreams for the coming years.

It looks like two travel-weary, frightened, and probably filthy kids arriving in a town for tax purposes only to find themselves caught up short by the inconvenient miracle of childbirth…and the shock of the visit from shepherds still shining from their brush with eternity, saying the slippery, pink, wrinkled, precious creature lying in a trough before them is so much more than that.

It looks like the child’s mother struck silent by these words, turning them over in her mind like small smooth stones from a river that flows on and on, endless and sourceless.

What does love look like?

It looks like resilience. It looks like surprise. It looks like awe.

It looks like us.