Whichever Path Love's Caravan Takes

Dear one —

Your message arrived this morning as we were dragging the tree to the curb and packing suitcases in the trunk. Now at 35,000 feet, as is often the case when I am among the clouds, I find myself reflecting on your words. 

What you meant about feeling heavy-hearted and adrift, I understand. Feelings are rarely single-noted, and our mandate is to bear witness in this paradoxical season. Who has real answers? Reality is as it is and what we can do, palms turned upward, is ask what Love wants of us.

I read how Bethlehem was closed for Christmas this year. Hauntingly, the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church placed its nativity scene beneath the rubble.

A memory from more than a decade ago articulates itself more clearly to me now. I’m in the West Bank, among the limestone hills just South of Jerusalem, with the ostensible purpose of training mindfulness teachers who serve in refugee camps. 

A friend brings me to Bethlehem from Ramallah to visit the Church of the Nativity, built above the site where Jesus is believed to have been born. As we pass through checkpoints along the way, I reflect on how today everything seems so dangerously close here. But it must have seemed a great distance for a Jewish family from Nazareth, more than 70 miles from Bethlehem, to be summoned for a census two thousand years ago. For a woman so close to giving birth.

My friend is Muslim and wraps her days in prayer. Our visit is her suggestion. After all, the Church of the Nativity’s original structure was built in the 4th century, making it the oldest pilgrimage site in the Christian tradition.

Admittedly, I agree to go in deference to her kindness. I don’t identify as Christian; in fact, I’m less and less interested in any particular identity. Despite singing in the choir and serving as an acolyte throughout my childhood, I associate Christianity with secular tradition and a complicated historical inheritance.

Meanwhile, over the years I’ve found my way to contemplative practice and the poetry of the mystics. Here’s 12th century Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi speaking of the caravan of all religion —

My heart wears all forms:

For gazelles it is an open field,for monks a cloister.

      It is a temple for idols,      and for pilgrims the Ka’ba.

            It is the Torah’s tablets            and the pages of the Quran.

Love is the faith I follow.

Whichever path Love’s caravan takes,      that is my road and my religion.

Dear, do you remember how the Upanishads describe the heart as hridaya guhā, a cave of hidden wonder? We’ve spoken of how one must step inside with a lowered head. How one’s eyes must adjust to the dim, warm light.

Of what this memory shows me now, of what it meant to descend the worn stone stairs and step into the grotto beneath the pews, to touch the inlaid silver star that millions have touched before , I can say only this: I felt an ancient peace.

Do what you can to light your lamp this week between the years. Make simple gestures of reconciliation. Take heart wherever you can. I’ll leave you for now with Rilke — anther mystic, another century, another adherent to the original religion of Love.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing.Embody me.

Flare up like a flameand make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.Just keep going. No feeling is final.Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59, translated by Joanna Macy

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