giving and living love

Someone who I deeply respect told me yesterday that after many years of searching, he had finally decided to throw away all of his beliefs but one: that god is a verb, not a noun, and that that verb is love.

What I’ve learned this summer is how to give and live love with all that one has, with one’s full heart, from the deepest parts of one’s self.

Jean Vanier says: “Love doesn’t mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.”

And so little of it is extraordinary, so little of it comes from feelings of adequacy, so little of it follows anything that makes sense, so little of it comes without a little pain, so little of it comes without a little joy, so little of it is simple and yet so little of it is complicated all at the same time.

It is a love that is lived in many forms.

It is lived in the form of wrapping your arms tight around the newly motherless child when she says: “just hold me” and calls you mama.

It is lived in the form of making funny faces at the 4 year old cancer patient when you return to the hospital after 3 weeks away and you heart drops down a floor when you realize he hasn’t left.

It is lived in the form of singing Beyoncé songs off key as you bump over muddy roads in an ambulance while the woman next to you cries in pain that you can’t take away from her.

It is lived in the form of leaving ginger sodas on the bed of the suicidal and sick 15-year-old living at the hospice whenever he gets perfect marks on his homework.

It is lived in the form of lifting child after child and swinging them around and around until your muscles start to shake and you wake up with an aching back the next morning.

It is lived in the form of looking and smiling and clapping and laughing and saying ‘hey, hey good job!’ every single time, over and over and sometimes in five directions at once, when each child says with pride and joy: “ona! Look!”

It is lived in the form of showing up, of walking the miles to, of making the effort to visit the home, the family, the child, even if not for long and even if nothing concrete transpires and even if you do nothing but sit, to be together.

It is lived in the form of shrugging your shoulders and doing nothing but laugh when the abused and underdeveloped two year old who is afraid of sound crawls into your lap and smiles, covering your skirt with urine, drool, and snot in less than 30 seconds.

It is lived in the form of joyously playing memory, connect four, blocks, puzzles with missing pieces, jenga, the same word search over and over and over and over again because even after what feels like the 400th time, it still brings the child delight.

It is lived in the form of brushing flies of the wasting and weakening child lying on the mud floor alone as you crouch next to him, despite knowing that as soon as you leave in ten minutes they will all come crawling back.

It is lived in the form of pulling the child whom everyone has named, and who feels so much, your son against your chest after three weeks away, kissing his head, and telling him: “I am so happy to see you”.

It is lived in the form of saying goodbye, of taking Mary Oliver’s words to life when she says to love what is mortal, holding it against our bones as if our own life depends on it, and when the time comes to “let it go, let it go.”

There is only to love with your full, deep heart, whatever and whoever exists before you and however it is possible. Most days, not much else seems to make any sense.

I go into my last week in this place giving and living love as if my own life depends on it, knowing that in seven days, I will have to let it go, let it go.