i will lay down my heart..."

"I will lay down my heart,
and I'll feel the power..."

I love Bon Iver's cover of Bonnie Raitt's hauntingly beautiful  "I Can't Make You Love Me," .

This post is not specifically about romantic love -- although it is certainly included in the broadest sense of love. This post is about a love that cannot be stifled in us -- or in the world.

Paul writes in Romans that:

"I am persuaded, that
neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth, more any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God..."

And Mary Baker Eddy further assures her readers in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"Divine Love cannot be deprived
of its manifestation or object."

As a girl - and young woman - I thought that I needed someone's permission to love them. Without reciprocity, I was stuck with either seeing myself as having a crush on someone, envious of an experience, or being a stalker. I didn't want to be thought ridiculous, so if someone didn't love me, or want my love in return, I was willing to accept that I was just a broken heart -- waiting.

But a series of life lessons -- along with the encouragement of the two above-quoted passages -- changed all of that.

The first, was a call to return the son we were adopting to his birthmother. The second was having someone I loved, fall out of love with me. And the third was discovering that a family member, whom I loved, had never really felt the same way about me. These experiences were individually and collectively awakening.  One, no more, than the other.

In each case, I felt like I had to stop loving. Or at least, I needed to adjust the volume of my devotion, re-think the intensity my affections, or, ratchet down my expectations in the relationship. As if, someone else's love for me -- or the role they played (or didn't play) in my life -- was a permission I needed to justify loving them.

One night, while praying in the dark, Bonnie Raitt's song rose in my heart. It was arresting -- because at that moment I was not praying about a romantic relationship -- which this song seemed so obviously about. I was praying for freedom from how small I felt about loving something that was emotionally inaccessible.

Bonnie's song slipped in.  And in the midst of that self-doubt, I suddenly realized that it didn't matter whether or not someone loved me. Or, in the case of the son we'd been adopting, was "mine." I wasn't waiting for permission. I was the unconditional expression of Love. Period. The conditions didn't need to be "optimal" for me to exercise my right to love. I could no more stop loving them -- or controlling the amount of love I felt for them -- than I could tell the sun to stop shining.

And I didn't want to. I loved them. That was all I knew. I didn't love them to own them. I didn't love them because I thought it would result in an outcome that would make me feel better about myself. I loved them because it was who I was. I loved them because God had put that love in my heart for a holy purpose. Even if I might not know what it was, on any given day.

So I stopped looking for permission -- and just loved. Fully, completely, boldly, fiercely, stupidly - according to those who had some pretty strong opinions about my willingness to love "even though." Sometimes this love asked things of me that I never would have imagined. To surrender, to accept, to step back, or to step even more deeply into the darkness. But it was no longer about what someone else thought or felt about me. It was about my right to love. It was about obedience to the Love that was moving in my heart.

This kind of love is empowering. Nothing can take it from you. And no one can deprive you of the power you have to truly love someone. Even if that means cherishing their gifts from afar -- or praying for the grace to see them move forward in a direction that might look like it is away from you.

It's the same with the things we love. If you love writing, write. Write with all your heart. You do not need to wait for a certain number of readers to validate you, or a publisher to give you their stamp of approval -- or a publishing contract. You are empowered by the love you feel, for whatever it is that God has put in your heart. Love it fully. If you love the practice of law -- don't wait for the opportunity to attend law school, love the practice of law wherever you see it. In nature, in government, in the inscrutable power of divine Love.

And since we are completely incapable of controlling love -- perhaps its time to stop trying. Just love. Not in a possessive way, but in a "here am I, send me..." kind of way. The object (or focus) of our affections may seem to be self-assigned - "I choose to love you."  But here is what I know -- it is always God-appointed. So trust it. Love what - and who - you have been moved to love. Whether they love you back, or not, you will still feel the power.

Whether that loving results in a life-long partnership, a larger family, or an outcome that is worthy of writing a self-help primer on "having it all," - it doesn't matter. Love isn't a means to an end. Love is everything. Loving is everything.

Love, truly, cannot be deprived of the object of its affections. Love is not something you get. Love is all that you - already - are. So if you want to feel the power of who you are - just love.

offered with Love,

Cate

"love has no pride..."

"Love has no pride,
when there's no one left to blame.
And I'd give anything
just to see you again..."

My friend George posted this video of Bonnie Raitt singing her hauntingly beautiful  "Love Has No Pride"  with David Crosby and Graham Nash at the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert in 2009. It took me apart. I am still sniffling.

This will be one of those posts that you will only find if you are looking beyond what is right at the top of this blog. I do that when I need to say something, but don't really know how I feel about it being read. I will write another post right on the heels of this one and post it quickly. Most people will not scroll further.

Here is what I need to say. I have loved three men in my life.  They were men I hoped I would love for the rest of my life. And I will. I will not be married to them -- but I will love them.  

The reasons that those relationships were not my "last great love" is not important, other than to say I was not an easy person to love or live with. I was afraid of being rejected and abandoned -- every day. And without intending to, I made sure that I'd have a reason for that rejection when the time came. Jeff will tell you that it has taken much spiritual self-examination to realize this -- and to heal it.

What happens -- at least for me - is, that when I see through the tangle of my own emotional forest, I get clearer views of what was always true, at the very heart of things. And what is true about each of these men is that they are deeply good. They are kind, honest, beautiful men of integrity. I was blessed in each case.

Have I ever told them that. No. At least not the first two. Why? Because I am afraid. Yup. I am afraid that I will be thought ridiculous. I am afraid that they will think, "a little too late." I am afraid that I will be rejected and dismissed. It is all about pride.

I have a bigger fear though. That bigger fear is that one of us will leave this chapter of our eternal lives without my having said what is in my heart. I am not "in love" with either of my earlier loves, but I do love them. I love them for the kindness they showed a fragile, skittish woman-child who tried so hard to seem confident, smart, and whole. I love them for the patience they showed each time I reached the fight-or-flight stage of my anxiety. I love them for believing in me when I didn't believe in myself. I love them for loving themselves enough to move on -- into relationships and marriages that were so much better for them. And I just love them for being the men I love.

I don't expect either of them to read this or to understand how I could love them so much, and not be able to say what is in my heart. I don't understand it either.

When my grandfather was very ill and it was likely that he would pass away in a hospital -- far from where he'd become a man, married my grandmother, and raised their children -- it was my grandmother who he'd divorced decades earlier, that he asked to see. His current wife was by his bedside, but he asked to see my grandmother. She refused. He passed without that reconciliation. That story always broke my heart.

Years late when my grandmother was facing serious memory-related issues I spent time with her in prayer. One day we were sitting in her room, at the care facility where she was living, and I asked her about my grandfather. She was silent for the longest time before she began to weep. She wept the tears of the broken-hearted. I sat quietly by her side.

After some time, I asked her again to tell me about my grandfather and their young marriage. She smiled the smile of a girl, and began to tell me about falling in love, courtship, the early days of becoming a family with the three small children they raised in a lovely neighborhood.

As far as I know, my grandmother did not have any memory-related episodes again after that conversation. She would soon leave the care facility and spend time with all three of her children and their families before her peaceful passing. Her heart was lighter, her laughter was sweeter, her peace was deeper.

I take great comfort in something Paul says in his epistle to the Romans:

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution,
or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him that loved us. For I am persuaded,
that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God..."

Love doesn't weaken us. Love empowers us. Love has no pride. It is not afraid of looking ridiculous. It is not afraid of failing. It is not afraid of being rejected. I pray that I can more fully realize this love in myself.

I know that nothing can keep me from loving the people I love -- whether they feel the same about me, or not. Perhaps someday I will have the courage to tell them how much they have meant to me -- even after we were no longer together. If I do, I will tell them how much I love them -- and their new families. I will tell them how grateful I am for their wives, who love them in ways I seemed incapable of loving when I was a younger woman.

Until then, I will pray for their happiness, I will see them through the purest eyes, I will delight in their accomplishments and weep with their sorrows. And mostly, I will be grateful that I have known great men who have helped me grow into this woman who is learning what it means that Love has no pride. Thank you.


offered with Love,

Kate

"I can't make you love me..."

"I was young and caught in a crowd
I didn't know then, what I know now
I was dumb, and I was proud
and I'm sorry..."

A new reader sent me a link to this video clip of Kate Miller-Heidke's "Caught in a Crowd" and I love it.  I remember being on both sides of this coin.  Both the girl-child who put acceptance and popularity above what she truly felt was right, and the teenager who felt forsaken by those she thought she could count on as friends.

But then there is another "me" who watches this video.  It is the one who has stood up for a friend, when others turned their back.  This is the me I wish I'd always allowed to show up, every moment...and whose face I seek  in the mirror each day, as I navigate the waters of my community and the world I live in.

As most readers know, my childhood was a seemingly endless series of moves.  New houses, neighborhoods, towns, schools.  As a girl, I was small, shy, and bookish...and I was teased.  I now know, that some children think teasing is funny, and use it as a way of reaching out to someone they want to know.  But this certainly wasn't something I was aware of  then.  As a little girl,  being teased felt like being hated. 

At other times, children at a new school would try to intimidate me, and make me feel embarrassed about my academic accomplishments or creativity.  Whenever I would ace a spelling test or receive a compliment from a teacher or a dance coach, I would experience rejection, which sometimes felt like the whole world was in opposition to my identity. 

But it wasn't the teasing that was most painful.  Or even the feeling of having an entire class of fellow students making fun of me. Since I was only being me...quiet, bookish, artistic. It was none of those things that hurt the most.  It was simply being ignored. 

Being ignored was the worst.  It was sitting in the lunch room and looking up as each girl came away from the lunchline...tray loaded with jello, mac and cheese, tomato soup, cupcakes...hoping, as they walked towards me, that they would join me at my otherwise empty table, only to have them look through me and make happy eye contact with the girls across the room.   It was the horror of having finally found the courage to pass a note to the girl who had played with me on the playground that morning, hoping it was the beginning of a new friendship, only to see her slide it under her binder and never look back.

Early on, my mom taught me a little poem that went with me to school every day...and I think saved my heart from breaking:

"When others hate, oppose, ignore...
Help me Lord to love them more."

I think Mom knew that as long as my heart was still beating, still trying to love more and more, it couldn't atrophy, get hard and brittle, shatter and break.  It would stay warm and alive, and would feel like it, my heart, had a vital role to play in saving its host...me.

I can also remember one of those times. I was a junior in high school.  I think it might have been one of the first years I'd everreturned to the same school for a second September.  I knew a few kids, had made some friends the previous spring, and I think a boy might have even liked me.  I felt like I could, perhaps...maybe, just be me and not have to work so hard at making people like me. 

One day I was standing at the counter of the student council "store" (a window outside the lunchroom where you could buy t-shirts and spirit pennants with our school's name and mascot blazoned across the front in green and gold) when a very serious boy I sat next to in my typing class came out of the lunchroom, and as he turned to say, "hi," he tripped and dropped his books.  As I bent to help him pick up his papers and splayed binders, one of the popular boys who played football kicked one of those books across the corridor just as he reached for it.  It sent the rest of the football team, also standing around the student council store, into gales of self-congratulatory, mean-spirited laughter.

Only moments before I had been on the verge, the very cusp, of acceptance and popularity.  I had on my favorite box-pleated blue plaid mini skirt (or at least it was as mini as I could get, hemming it, in fast whip stitches, on the short bus ride from our house to school that morning) and the boy I liked was paying attention to me.

But somthing much deeper kicked into gear that day.   I had been the new girl way too often, and had suffered so horribly at the hand of the popular kids in every other school I'd attended, to let my typing class friend become the object of their derision, all alone.

So I shot Mr. Fullback a look of disappointed pity mixed with my best version of compassion, helped Thomas gather the last of his chemistry notes, and walked with him to the library....my favorite room in the building.  Leaving my new, and once hoped for, football and cheerleader friends laughing and teasing us about being the new "Mr. and Mrs. Four Eyes Brainiacs."  But rather than actually become the latest butt of Mr. Fullback's jokes the next day, and  for the rest of the semester (something I was almost sure would happen) he actually seemed to like, or perhaps even respect, me a little after that day.   Or perhaps I didn't care quite as much as I thought I did.  

Of all the lessons I remember from that year of "not being the new girl," that day outside the lunch room was one of my favorite moments of self-realization.    Unfortunately, there were also times when I was "caught in a crowd" and didn't stand up to the way my new more popular friends were behaving.  For those times I am truly sorry.

Bottom line, I have learned that being ignored is more painful than either hatred or opposition.  It is a dismissal of our identity.  It says "you don't deserve my response" and it just plain hurts.  But I have also learned that it is only practiced by those who are afraid of being associated with what they fear will reveal their own self-doubts and insecurities...and so, what it now says to me is that they just need to be loved more. 

A young friend contacted me recently.  She had been praying for the spiritual strength to rise above the hurt of being verbally bullied at her school.  She felt that, so far, she'd been able to navigate her days with poise and courage, and without tears.  But this day she was absolutely shattered.  After her sobbing subsided a bit, she was able to explain that she felt as if the other girls at school looked right through her as if she wasn't even there.  But even though that hurt...alot...she still felt that could handle it most of the time.  But what had her at the very edge of the abyss, unable to hold on, was a week of waiting for one of the girls she'd "friended" on Facebook, to accept her invitation. 

Each day she would rush home from school to check in, and see if the girl's profile picture had appeared in her friends list.  It hadn't.  She said that, "being ignored was worse than being bullied."  She felt helpless.   "What is wrong with me? What have I done?  What can I do to make it better?"  It was the not knowing that made her feel terribly helpless, and alone.

I was so grateful that I could share my mom's little poem with her.  We talked for a bit until she was more peaceful.  I knew I had given her one of my "five smooth stones"...something I'd proven in my own battle with the Goliath of self-doubt.  She reported the next day that she no longer felt like a victim of "being ignored," but as if she was "like David, only a girl."  God was asking her to just be herself, and "love more."  It made her feel like she "had the power!"

And she did. 

As Bonnie Raitt says in her song, "I Can't Make you Love Me":

"Here in the dark, in these lonely hours
I wil lay down my heart, and I'll feel the power.
But you won't, no you wont...
Cause I can't make you love me, if you don't..."

The goal is not to make someone love us.  It is to love, love, love...and love more, because it is our identity, our only way of truly feeling the power of God as Love, coursing through our veins as the animating, revitalizing, restorative, regenerative current of true Being.

Thanks, Mom, for giving me this little poem, and for teaching me how to use the most lovely "smooth stones" in battling indifference, and becoming me...the true me, the real me, the me that can stand alone with God, and without fear...it's much better than just getting "caught in a crowd."

love you Mommy,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"Feels like home to me..."

"A window breaks down a long dark street,
And a siren wails over my head.
But I'm all right, 'cause I have you here with me.
And I can almost see through the dark there's light.
If you knew how much this moment means to me,
And how long I've waited for your touch.
If you knew how happy you are making me --
I've never thought I'd love anyone so much...

Feels like home to me, feels like home to me,
Feels like I'm on my way back where I come from.
Feels like home to me, feels like home to me,
Feels like I'm on my way back where I belong."
- Bonnie Raitt

It was Saturday night and the blue, almost darkness of dusk was descending faster than I had expected.  We live in the city and quite often my husband and I walk through our neighborhood to the urban center where an active commercial, cultural and social life still bustles long after they roll up the sidewalks in the suburbs.  We love it.  We love the ebb and flow of humanity, the way the sound of conversation and laughter float out of restaurant doors and briefly meeting the eyes of strangers with a smile as we pass one another on the street.

But this past month my husband has been out of town on business and I have been taking our walks alone.  For the most part my walks have been in during the daylight hours.  This particular Saturday, however, I was feeling a bit housebound.  I had already taken a walk earlier that day and I wanted more.  I wanted to feel connected to a larger sense of community. So I bundled up against the early December chill and ventured out again just before sunset.  It was glorious.  The air was clear and cold without being bitter and walking was refreshing.  I felt brave as I walked briskly along city streets.  I stopped at our favorite coffeehouse and sat under a canopy of stars writing in my journal, sipping hot chocolate and listening to folk music…much longer than I had expected to.  By the time I realized how late it was the air had turned bitter and the streets were lonely as pedestrians found warmth inside galleries and restaurants, escaping the cold. 

My walk home was invigorating, but I started to feel the emptiness of the streets even more than the sudden drop in the temperature.  Walking alone in the city is a very different experience when café tables crowd the sidewalk, conversation mixes with the sound of traffic, and music drifts out from open doorways.  On a cold December night fellow pedestrians are huddled beneath hoods and heavy jackets that mask the smiles I hope are there, the winds causes streetlamps to swing eerily in the dark casting strange shadows that weave and duck along empty brick walls, and sirens wail through the hardscape of urban asphalt and concrete. 

As I made my way past storefronts I noticed for the first time how many darkened alleys shot back from the main sidewalk.  Neighbors that normally greeted us as we walked by from their front stoops were absent, and in their place were the neighborhood's homeless.  As I passed one building at the far end of "the Loop" a huddled figure slipped out from a doorway and began following me.  All of my antennae went up immediately.  My hand balled into fists in my pockets and my pace picked up.  But his stride was longer than mine and within moments he was only a few steps behind me.  Sirens were wailing a few blocks away and the big plastic Christmas bells strung across the street were swinging wildly overhead.  My heart was beating and my thoughts were racing.  What would I do if he came up behind me and grabbed me.  Suddenly taking a walk after dark in the city seemed foolish and dangerous. 

This was the very moment of divine intervention. 

Out of the blue the thought came, "Kate, remember…this is your neighborhood, these are your neighbors, you love it here, this is your home." 

God spoke to me and my heart was at peace.  I needed to feel His touch, hear His voice, be reminded that He had brought me to this neighborhood, he had sent me here to love and be loved, and had never left my side.  I was where He wanted me to be.  I was among my brothers and sisters in Christ. 

My pace slowed, my heart calmed and by the time my neighbor reached me I was so ready to say, "Hi, isn't it a beautiful night to be walking?"  It was then that I saw the face under the wool cap, inside the hooded sweatshirt…the warm brown eyes, the beautiful smile.  "Yes," he agreed, "just beautiful."  His stride was long and in seconds he was well out in front of me.  I watched the strong back of my neighbor, huddled against the wind, growing smaller by the moment and sent up a prayer of gratitude for God's mercy and grace. 

Wherever He is, I am home.
Kate

Update: Since posting this story in 2007, Edwina Hayes recorded this lovely version of"Feels Like Home" for the 2009 film "My Sister's Keeper". Sam sent it to me and I thought I would share it here...enjoy.

with Love, .
Kate