Become Love

I know exactly the right thing to do. Sitting in a church pew with my parents and brother, I am no more than 6 years old. My other brother and little sister aren’t born yet. Archdeacon Hall, stooped with a bend in his back, is preaching a sermon when he steps out of the pulpit and walks down into the congregation. He is looking at me as he moves toward my family. He puts his hands into either side of his vestment where there must be pockets. I wait. Then each of his hands emerge holding an apple. Now he stands in front of me and extends his arms with open palms as he offers me the apples.

He says, “Imagine these apples are for you and your friend. Which one do you give to your friend and which one do you take for yourself?”

I don’t hesitate. I point to the polished red apple and say, “This one is for my friend.” Then I point to the bruised browning apple and say, “This one is for me.”

Looking up and over to my dad, I see him smile and nod his head. I have made the right choice. He is proud.

The archdeacon smiles, too. “You are a good girl,” he says.

Then he takes the apples back and looks up at the congregation as he says, “In everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”

Fast forward to the summer of 1980, I am standing at a podium before an auditorium filled with people and deliver a high school valedictory speech about a rainbow, a life, and a promise in the search for love. I am eighteen years old now and receive a standing ovation.

As the audience rises, I am remarkably nonplussed. I turn to look behind me and see forty-two classmates also stand up from their seats. I face the audience again as I am transported to a remote place within myself that is quiet.

It’s not the first time I have delivered a speech. I have won many trophies for oratory. I love the process of writing words to speak. But this is the biggest room I’ve heard my voice through and the challenge has not been the writing, or the speaking, but my ability to hold the echo of power coming back to me in response.

When the writer I am today remembered this standing ovation, I became curious to read the speech again.

Then one afternoon I was digging through the storage tubs in the garage when I came upon high school yearbooks. I carried the treasures upstairs to my desk and put the kettle on for tea.

I sat down, opened the 1979-80 yearbook edition and thumbed through its pages. When I saw the valedictorian two-page spread, I read what was written forty years ago. In an illuminating moment, I saw how the trajectory of my marital escapades had begun. I’d fallen into a great and gaping hole — the whole of human history and its ideas about love — and the speech I delivered was the map of things to come: marriage, widowhood, divorce, single parenting.

In the speech I actually posed the question: What about the Inner Being? And then conflated the idea of its existence with the need to be wanted, needed and loved by that extra special someone. So the spirit of clear discrimination being unconscious in me was necessarily projected onto an extra special someone. And the lifelong task would be to dissolve this projection in relationship to men in order to restore power I wasn’t yet aware of having lost.

Although my spiritual idealism was seeded in truth, and I was embarking on a mission to know my inner being and discover true love, I had not been prepared for what would be demanded of me to resurrect that idealism.

I also understood it wasn’t the actual words spoken that drew people out of their seats. It was the energy infusing those words — I was clearly a passionate young woman seeking the unknown adventure in a storm of longing. But my life’s journey would teach me there are two strands of power to that passion for the woman I would become: sexuality and creativity. And I’d need to learn how to discriminate one from the other.

Turning back to the graduation ceremony I could see in my mind’s eye how I stood in quietude before pivoting away from the audience, and walking back to my chair in the third row on stage with my classmates who continued to applaud. They didn’t sit down until I did.

My mother, a woman who felt trapped in her own house as though her life was somewhere other than where she was, and my father, a man who could never understand why his wife or his children ever wanted to leave home for anything, were watching me from their seats in the audience. Mom told me later how I made Dad cry. During that standing ovation, he looked at her and said, “When did she learn to do that?”

It may well have been safer to just stay home, as my beloved father would have wanted for me, but my encounters with other men provoked me to take an adventure and discover the life calling me from beyond.

Love is everything I was dreaming about, even more, but nothing at all what I expected it to be. For the Golden Rule works both ways — I learned to do unto myself what I would have unerringly done unto others.

Question for Reflection:
Where do I project my ideas about love? What are my expectations about how others need to do or be something in order for me to feel loved? How do I resist being an actor of love, in love, for love?