Relentless Love

Advent 2020

This year I’ve felt (and still feel) that I have nothing to write or say. There’s just too much, and simultaneously too little.

And yet, if we are to be believers (in something, anything), we tend to believe in some version of this: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13).

I remember hearing David Whyte talk about Beowulf, and how there is this unrelenting thrum of struggle that doesn’t end, and then it doesn’t end, and then it still does. not. end. Like this year, this relentlessly horrific year.

Maya Angelou said, “Love keeps the stars in the firmament.” It is a force that powerful. If that is true, perhaps in this season of waiting, it’s enough to close our eyes and just say, “Please.” Please be there, please hold, please last, please help, please sustain.

Here is the rest of the poem that the Maya Angelou line is taken from. I believe it to be true.

“Love builds up the broken wall
and straightens the crooked path.
love keeps the stars in the firmament
and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides
each of us is created of it
and i suspect
each of us was created for it.”