22

There Was Evening and There Was Morning…

“Love bears believes all things. Believes all things. Hopes All things. Endures all things. Love never fails.”

We were overlooking the Caribbean from our cliffside table, our day of mission work planned. It was only morning but the tropical heat was already thickening the ocean air like flour does gravy.

Our bellies full of a Haitian spaghetti breakfast and our hearts full of Caribbean beauty, we stood up and shouldered our backpacks.

“Oh my God.”

One in our group had just been emailed and was staring in shock at his phone. We froze, a few of us daring to ask. He skimmed the email and then summarized it for us aloud. A famous international recording artist’s daughter had just been killed.

“His five year old daughter was accidentally run over and killed yesterday in her own driveway,” He said, grimacing. “Their own SUV. It was driven by her brother.”

We gasped. With tens of thousands of others who immediately recognized the countless layers of agony, we gasped.

We shook our heads at each other for a few minutes. One was visibly tearful. A few prayed awkward, fragmented prayers. Finally we decided to get on with our day and began filing back through the open air lobby toward the parking lot to load our supplies and depart for our worksite. I was in the rear of the line, and I was stopped.

“Is it not magnificent?”

The woman’s accent wasn’t Haitian. It was French. She was the owner of the hotel at which our team was staying. She had an air of sophistication and confidence, her arms folded, her right hand gripping mango juice, a lit cigarette in her left. She was staring just past me, transfixed.

“Isn’t what magnificent?” I said as the rest of the group walked on.

“The plant.” She answered, nodding behind me. A tall tropical plant grew from the middle of the terrace around which the tables were arranged. Its large fronds could each conceal a child. “In all the years I have been here, I can never stop appreciating how perfect this plant is.”

Her accent made the plant seem like an exhibition. I looked again at the plant I had just walked by. She was right; it was perfect. Consummate symmetry, one side a flawless mirror of the other. The leaves so green and healthy it seemed plastic. It could have been the three dimensional logo for the species. Perfection.

“Wow,” I said, mindful I was separated from the team physically and emotionally now. “It’s really. . .really amazing.”

“And, more than this, we were made to appreciate such things. It is all really magnificent, is it not?”

I nodded absently, torn between two worlds.

She held up her mango juice. “Yes. Well, au revoir.”

Jesus’ cousin John the Baptizer had been thrown in jail for telling the truth to the powers that distorted it. John had barely been processed and fingerprinted before Jesus was ostensibly picking up where’d left off.

He began proclaiming “Good News”. This, as his original hearers would’ve recognized, was the very language of war, or more specifically, war’s end. Heralds came back from the front in those pre-Breaking News Alert days to announce a given war had ended favorably. Conflict had ceased. Violence and division were over. Loved ones would be reunited. This information brought back home from the front was called the gospel.

Jesus announced Good News as his beloved cousin was incarcerated for the crime of candor. You and I may have called Jesus’s timing insensitive.

But this is our world. This is our faith.

Good things always available in the midst of the bad. Beauty stained by horror. Liberty barbed with injustice. Beautiful, symmetrical trees and the unwitting souls they fall upon. If Christ really came to show us how to live, then of course he must teach us to find good news while bad news is happening in his own family. This is what “getting it” means. We can assume Christ gets it.

It is an act of compassion to grieve with those who grieve. To listen and understand what it is that makes people feel like there’s nothing left to get out of bed for. To do otherwise is often the delusional self-protective act of denial.

Yet.

Love also embraces the creative power the Universe runs on and suggests, “as we acknowledge the difficulty of life, let’s never forget the greater context.” It shows up while you’re in bed and says, “Coffee? Walk? Hope?” until you finally take her up on it.

Paul said Love bears and believes and hopes all things. Which is as close as one can get to saying, “Love makes us each a naive pollyanna, ill-equipped to face reality,” as you can get without saying it. Love’s toes are on a line here. It’s seemingly aware it may look silly to the self-assured cynic, and yet is so seeing of reality that “denial” can’t legitimately be leveled at it. Love is too strong to simply offer wishful thinking like morphine to the terminal.

Love chooses to keep itself unflinchingly attuned to real pain while risking the belief that things are still, in the wash, good.

We despair when we lose people and jobs and relationships. When plans fall through. When the bottom falls out. The word despair literally comes from the idea of hope falling down. Like a building I can no longer live in. I give up and say, “My best days are behind me. It’s over.” For a season, maybe this is the only option that has any merit. Telling me not to might just piss me off. Especially if you tell me my despair is unfaithful.

Then there is hope. Hope has the artless etymology of “hop,” which implies it has us choose to keep moving. Though our pain is real, it moves forward under even the weakest conviction that the Universe is ultimately benevolent if its Author is Love. If I believe and live in the flow of Love, I allow for both despairing and hoping, yet with a bent for surrendering to the gravity of the latter.

Loving others is finding a way to honor the dignity of their pain while simultaneously, respectfully, giving them the gift of my own expanded context. When life hits the fan, Love and Hope serve as humble, creative acts. Acts of gently building from ruins. Beauty from ashes, as the saying goes. Jesus was after all rumored to be a carpenter – one who takes dead trees and busted stone and builds homes. We continue this inspired trade by respecting what’s fallen down as well as respecting we are creators made in the image of a Creator. Hope is on our side. I know that doesn’t make it easy.

Like hopping and building I suppose, hope takes work. Cynicism and despair are far easier. They say a smile takes less muscle than a frown, but I have found a blank stare is the least effort of all. But this work of hope, the carpentry of Love when things fall down, is what makes tangible my belief that the news from the front is, in the balance, Good. So I employ an amphibiousness which holds in tension wrongfully imprisoned John the Baptists and assurances from the Author of Life that great stories require sucky chapters. Love bears both. There is death and there is life. Random chaos and magnificent symmetry. Crying and laughing, all contextualized on a spinning planet of plants and deserts that ever rotate toward and away from the light of the sun.

Strap on your pack.
Au revoir.