Is This What Love Looks Like?
“Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worst insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions - because they might turn out to have no answer.” Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island.
What does love look like? I’m deficient with an answer. I’m not sure I know how to recognize love. I know I must have experienced it in order to live and survive, but I don’t think I can accurately describe what it looks like.
When I look into my psyche to find love, I come up empty. How can I not recognize or feel it? I know it’s there but I’m coming up empty handed. I ask myself “how do I feel loved” and I come up with no answer. I have people telling me they love me. I want to linger with them a little longer, discover it further and hope it sinks in deeper. When I try to recall the memory of what love feels like, I see a little girl standing by herself waiting. I don’t experience anything warm and fuzzy. Only intense pain of what love was suppose to look like but it was incomplete. She’s still waiting for something unrecognizable.
I don’t have a solid answer for what love looks like nor can I experience it deep in the center of my being. I’ve been looking and it feels like looking for something in the dark with shades on and not know what I’m looking for. The place where I hope to find what love was or supposed to be are blurry memories all jumbled up in an unappetizing soup of confused emotions that I don’t know know to interpret.
I try to do what I think is love. I hold, hug, kiss, and tell my kids that I love them thinking that’s love. I make Caleb spaghetti because it’s his favorite food, I buy Jonah strawberries because it’s his favorite fruit, and feed Esther avocado because she can’t get enough of it. Jonah needs constant kisses for his boo boos both real and imaginary, Esther wants to read Harry the Dirty Dog five times every night and Caleb loves to show me his school work. I do those things and put in the time because that's what I think love is. I hope that's part of love.
I cannot desire for what should have been given or received from those I beloved and never did. I have to reconcile that I never will. I can only desire for the love that moves in me and through me from the Holy Spirit where true love and perfect purity flows from God the Father and from The Son who so loved their beloved as to die for them. I can choose to enter into His death and suffering with the hope of experience what true love looks like.
Image: Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille. Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld. 1861. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA.
