This week's essay was written by
and is part 3 of a four part advent series.In different seasons, bright love can manifest in new ways. For a while, love was the steady palm of my mother on my head after a dark dream. Then, love was longing: total teen crushes, the swirl in the gut. Later, love was vulnerability: the body begins to make a person, and just like that, the loss of a pumpkin seed that would have become a grown baby. Love is geography: The idea of travel, and of home. When Mount Rainier is out in Seattle, the whole city lifts a bit off the ground to try and meet it.
In my own life, God’s love has been esoteric, required, very near, removed. I’ve learned that God’s love most often comes through other people. Sometimes, it is most powerfully observed in the stories of other folks.
Folks like Joel Barraquiel Tan, the executive director of the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle’s Chinatown-International district. Barraquiel Tan talked about the rise in racism towards Asian-Americans in a recent Week in Review conversation on KUOW, our local NPR station. Last September, a hate crime was committed by a man swinging a sledgehammer and busting the glass at the Wing Luke, the same night as a nearby Beyoncé concert.
The thing that Barraquiel Tan said that I can’t stop thinking about is the “choreography of love” that emerged directly after the incident. Many people, some dressed for the concert, others near or inside the museum sprang to action, calling for help, calling the mayor’s office, grabbing brooms and sweeping. Love in practice and tangible care.
18 Bottles
My dad got sick the first summer of the pandemic. One Sunday, I drove him home after a hospital stay and helped him into the rented hospital bed we'd ordered from a medical supply company. Then I went to the pharmacy to pick up his newly prescribed medications.
I held it together when I saw him in the hospital room, his body bloated, attached to many wires. I held it together, getting him into the rented bed in his apartment and lining the carpet with plastic on the path to the bathroom. There were a lot of fluids to deal with, that reminded me of a reverse birth.
I went to the Rite Aid counter to fill 18 prescriptions of Dad’s, many with names I could barely pronounce. Some were to be administered once every other day, others three times a day. Some were to be eaten with food, others on an empty stomach.
I was waiting for the pills to be filled and looking for his size in adult diapers when I began to weep in the aisle. I did not know what I was doing. I needed help and called my friend Amanda, a nurse. “What’s his address? I'm coming,” she said. I thought she was going to tell me if we needed to pick up a home pulse oximeter and blood pressure cuff. When she said “I’m coming” I let myself feel the weight of the weeks, from his diagnosis to that moment.
It was like that scene in the last Harry Potter where Ron and Ginny are covered by a wave of water in the Chamber of Secrets. It’s the shock that gets them out of their head and gives them the gumption to finally kiss. “I’m coming” was relief. When Amanda arrived, leaned by the bed and cared for him, then helped me dose his meds, I wanted to lay on the kitchen floor and sleep. It was the day when I learned God's love is often carried to us by other people.
This moment was a part of my own choreography of love: my friend sitting with Dad, offering practical and emotional care for my family. It is how any prayer for help since my parents got sick has been met, every time, in the unexpected kindness of another person.
The Big Dark
Simeon and Anna waited their whole lives to see Baby Jesus. In Luke 2, Simeon holds Jesus and says he can die in peace.
I’m doing the 19th Annotation of the Ignatian Exercises through next spring, which involves a fair amount of imaginative prayer. In a prayer exercise last week, I was invited to imagine holding Jesus as a baby next to my chest. As explained by the San Francisco-based spiritual director Dale Gish, the prompt is to imagine syncing your heartbeat with the heartbeat of Jesus.
“Sometimes a baby can melt your heart in a way that an adult could never do,” Gish writes.
Normally, this kind of aspirational earnestness would make me raise an eyebrow. But I moved past the cringe and tried to imagine this scenario in prayer. And my heart was melted: My heart was butter. I could feel it beating and imagined it in sync with the heart of God. It felt immense, a valentine balloon about to bust from helium. My heart was a bag of old crayons baked into a heart tin mold and made into something new, if just for a moment.
Simeon tells Mary and Joseph that through Jesus, “the deepest thoughts of many will be revealed.” Where is my heart in the folds of these deepest thoughts, and where is yours? In a layer cake of worry, where is love? Is love the pea under a thick slab of piled mattresses? If so, is that enough — to know love is there even if you can’t feel it?
We all know it by now: any new heart will inevitably be busted up as we live into the severe depravity of the world, of war, of people we love getting sick and, sometimes, not ever getting better. I’m learning how the heart grows in the midst of the longing, the losing. Here is the invitation to move towards community, towards a broader perspective that the waiting of Advent is not about getting to Christmas already. It is about how we are changed and grow in empathy in the slow, big dark.
is the Seattle-based author of Orphaned Believers (2023) and the forthcoming Nervous Systems, both from Baker Books. She has written about Christianity and culture for various publications and at Bitter Scroll. Connect on Threads and IG.
Coming up this month: A four-part Advent series
This collaborative series includes four essays written by four beautiful, thoughtful, tender writers. These essays are free for all subscribers, so please be sure to subscribe and check out Rachel, Liz, and Sara if you haven’t already!
12/3: Hope by
(The Black Letter)12/10: Peace byLiz Charlotte Grant(The Empathy List)
12/17: Love by Sara Billups(Bitter Scroll)
12/24: Joy by Sarah Southern (Wild + Waste)
Just love this piece. Thank you.
Oh my this is just so beautiful ❤️💔❤️✨