I have known love & it has made me

Talk about a worn-out word.  It is thrown around in our culture in a 1001 ways.  We ‘love’ everything from tires and toothpaste to our sitcoms and cars.  So much of media is trying to tell me what love is….what the objects of my love should be.  It is confounding and often driven by a greed and covetousness that worships our own wants and desires.  One commercial currently sings confidently ‘I want it all, I want it all’.  There is no such thing as having it all.  There are choices to be made—and ironically love is not centered in me.  It is focused on the ‘other’.  As I thought about love I recalled when Iove has come to me:

I thought about my maternal grandmother who sent birthday cards (I still have some of them) year after year telling me I was her favorite grandson(even though my double cousin, Stuart says she told him the same thing)

Love was the many phone calls from my uncle Leroy just to catch up or to set up a time to meet for BBQ in Tulsa when I arrived

Love is my high school friend David and his family “adopting me’ into their family while I was in high school when my own family was in turmoil.  The Steele family lake house was a safe place.

Love was when Professor Don Joy from Asbury immediately mirrored my interest to meet again soon after I’d written him to let him know I would enjoy more time with him after he’d spoken for a conference I’d chaired.  It was also when he came for three days to ‘babysit’ me the week after my cancer surgery.

Love was the $1000 that Barbara and Bill Johnson sent to help defer the cost of the Arizona counseling intensive in 1999.

Love is a field of blue bonnets in the hill country of Texas.

Love is the beauty of the day lilies I’m out photographing early in the mornings in June and July.

Love is the beauty of Lake Maggiano in Northern Italy.

Love was the invitation and plane ticket to join Bobby Michaels at Summerland Key for a week in 1992 the February after mom had died on Christmas Eve.  At that point as a single man and during his off season, Bobby would rent a house in the Keys for several months during the winter.  That year, the place had a main house and a guest house across the pool.  He gifted me the use of the guest house for that week…of fishing and snorkeling off his Sea Ray boat, of staring at the blueness of the sky through palm fronds…while on my back in a hammock…or afternoons wandering through Key West, (was my first taste of Conch fritters—I’ll pass) 

Love is the absolutely beautiful metaphors used by Barbara Brown Taylor in her writings—word smithery 

Love is the arms of any of my four grandkids wrapped around my neck

Love is my wife of going on fifty years that has stayed, tolerated and endured my stuff through the decades

Love is the beauty of the Moran painting of the Snake River at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.

It is the sparkle of light and color through the kaleidoscope I bought in Kappa Kauai.

It is the wonder of light through stained glass I have made as well as the magnificent cathedral windows of Europe.

It is the smell of the lilac bushes that lined our back yard of my family home

It was having seventy-five family and friends show up for my 70th birthday (with Richard Hoertner expressing his birthday wishes “European style”.  They are our Astro-Mex couple…he’s from Austria, Gloria is from Mexico)

Friends Richard and Gloria Hoertner (70th birthday party) He’s Austrian, she’s from Mexico.

It is the aroma of the roast almost done as we enter the house from church

It is the fragrance of the Swiss cologne I purchased atop Mt. Pilate in Switzerland

Love is the smell of plumeria leis in Hawaii and the plumeria I grow on my deck in the summer

It is the smell of gardenias in the sultry Texas summer heat

It is the experience of a Strauss concert in Vienna in the same hall where he performed a century before

It is the expanse of a sunset on the horizon of the upper desert of New Mexico

I have come to believe that love is the energy that holds the world together…literally the atoms of everything.  It is the very essence of what God said that he was and is.  ‘In Him I have my being--live and breathe’. This energy, this force holds me together too.  It surrounds me…in all its variations and forms.  It is a creation that never ceases to astound me with its’ beauty…whether that be person, place or ‘thing’…such as writing, a painting, a piece of sculpture, a garden or a landscape.  God ‘inhabits’ his creation.  Like other artists I recognize in their work, God is in his handiwork.  I’m not saying he IS his handiwork…but his likeness is reflected in it.  Others will enjoy a Thomas Moran painting for what it is, or the works of any other artist.  I am taken away with the wonder of their creative gift as they mirror in their medium of paint the beauty God originated.  

John Denver describes love this way:

PERHAPS LOVE

Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm
It exists to give you comfort
It is there to keep you warm
And in those times of trouble
When you are most alone
The memory of love will bring you home

Perhaps love is like a window
Perhaps an open door
It invites you to come closer
It wants to show you more
And even if you lose yourself
And don't know what to do
The memory of love will see you through

Oh, Love to some is like a cloud
To some as strong as steel
For some a way of living
For some a way to feel
And some say love is holding on
And some say letting go
And some say love is everything
And some say they don't know

And some say love is holding on
And some say letting go
And some say love is everything
Some say they don't know

Perhaps love is like the ocean
Full of conflict, full of change
Like a fire when it's cold outside
Or thunder when it rains
If I should live forever
And all my dreams come true
My memories of love will be of you

I have known many forms of love…and they have changed me.  I am certain that was the Creator’s intent.  Love is a force, it is as Denver says it is a fire, it is a window, it is an open door.  It is the portal to life in all the abundance it was intended to be.  It entails, like decades of marriage, conflict and change.  It can be confusing at times…but, in the end, I am trusting that love will take me—will take us, home.  And, home is wherever God is.

I know it sounds circular and in ways, it is. It’s in the same realm as quantum physics which requires leaving my mind to ‘comprehend’ the beyond.  

I just revel in how it continues to change me…make me…take me. And like so many before me, what I can write about is what love does…not what it is.  In the end, maybe I will just return to a form of that energy and be a part of what holds everything together…for eternity. In a small way, maybe I already am.  

Not a bad thought…but there I am again back in my head.

Edit 3/2021