Well after almost 24 hours of travel, 18 of which were on a plane, I have safely arrived in Chautauqua, New York where I will spend the next week hanging out and attempting to slowly adjust to being back here.
Over the past several days as I
have packed my bags, said my goodbyes, boarded planes and said hello to one of
the places I call home, I have often been asked how my year was. My generic response tends to be “I
loved it” or something about loving the people, the culture or the place.
As I have constantly offered
this response, I have begun to wonder a bit about what it actually means when I
say that I “loved it.” While
reflecting on this, I recalled a devotion that a dear friend had offered during
my time at Luther. It was a
passage from a book called Pine Island Paradox, In the passage that was read,
author Kathleen Dean Moore contemplates this same thing: what does it mean to
love?
I think that the answer she
comes up with is poignant, accurate and much more articulate than I can be at
this point. Rather than try
to summarize or paraphrase, I will just share Moore’s words directly with you
and tell you that this is what I mean when I say I loved the people, the
culture and the place.
I stretched my back
and started two lists. What does
it mean to love a person? What
does it mean to love a place?
Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love---a person and a
place---means at least this:
One. To want to be near it, physically
Number two. To want to know everything about it---
its story, its mood, what it looks like by moonlight
Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it.
Number four. To
fear its loss, and grieve for its injuries.
Five. To protect it---fiercely, mindlessly,
futilely and maybe tragically; but to be helpless to do otherwise.
Six. To be transformed in its
presence---lifted, lighter, on your feet, transparent, open to everything
beautiful and new.
Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken it
by it, lost in it.
Number eight. To want the best for it.
Number nine. Desperately.
Love is an anchor
line, a rope on a pulley, a taut fly line, a spruce root, a route on a map, a
father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline know, eelgrass bent to the tide,
and all of these---a complicated, changing web of relationships, taken
together. It’s not a choice, or a
dream, or a romantic novel. It’s a
fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with
people and places. We are born
with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing
for these relations. That complex
connectedness----nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.
I knew there was
something important missing from my list but I was struggling to put it into
words. Loving isn’t just a state
of being, it’s a way of acting in the world. Love isn’t a sort of bliss, it’s a kind of work, sometimes
hard, spirit-testing works. To
love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to
make his needs my own needs.
To love a place is to care
for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own,
because they are my own.
Responsibility grows from love.
It is the natural shape of caring.
Number ten, I wrote
in my notebook. To love a person
or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being.
