Yesterday as I prepared to officiate the kindergarten graduation for the little boy I’ve been tutoring these past few months, I was struck by the strangeness of this year:

It began with large doses of coffee and nervous energy as I subbed in for a local high school music teacher (on maternity leave) while working at a dry cleaners. I did not feel qualified for this job, but somehow (like many of the things I’ve ended up doing in these three years since graduating college) I survived, learning most from my mistakes.

I never imagined I’d have the chance (thanks to the Forum for Theological Exploration) to travel and explore sacred music-making around the country before retreating home in the midst of Covid.

And now this five-year-old boy, one of my greatest teachers: he is teaching me to be flexible (or at least try), to forgive, to share. I guess I needed to go back to kindergarten. And what learning has this year’s “school of life” brought? Something I’m not quite sure why I believe but I think I do:

Love, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed. It is discovered, shared, transformed.

When we pray, we are joining in the love that already exists. The truest path between creatures, or creature and Creator, is this love that just Is. This love is Being. This love is Truth. This love is breath, the ineffable “I am” that even the deepest, spirit-suffocating structures cannot snuff out.

I have failed badly at understanding this. I have refused love and love’s truth; I have preferred to hide.

Since my good friend Val passed away a year ago, I am brought back day in and day out to a story she told me. Amidst a painful moment in her battle with cancer, between sleeping and waking, she received these words:

You have to let the love in.

Every day now, I pray that I might listen to this Voice, too.

I am torn up about the racism and white supremacy that binds and blinds our country, torn up too by my neglect to let this truth into my consciousness for so long. Torn up by the pain that slowly starts to seep in; torn up by the pain of our human family I cannot even begin to fathom. Lord, have mercy.

We have to let the love in.

Watching a friend’s wedding live-streamed today and reflecting on the reading from Song of Songs Chapter 2: “Arise, my love…come with me. Lo! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone…” I was reminded of a setting of this text I haven’t heard in years.

We hear here of the New Jerusalem, a vision of the city without any walls, where joy will never cease. A place where the human family can live and flourish. This is the reason I sing. This is the reason why I continue to have hope, despite the many walls I have built in my heart and my life. I believe that this good vision, this good work that God has begun, will be brought to completion.

The Rain is Over and Gone