Valentines


Years ago there was a gas station that sat on the southwest corner of Wyoming and Menaul, across the street from the old Hoffmantown Baptist Church in Albuquerque, and one night I, along with hundreds of other youths, vandalized the place.

I was thirteen or fourteen years old when our church hosted a traveling evangelist named Arthur Blessitt. He was making a name for himself (and I suppose some might say for Jesus) by walking across America towing a giant cross, and preaching the love of Christ. It was the early 1970's and the country was in the throes of what many called 'the Jesus Movement.' It may well have been not much more than a California revival, where guys like Arthur Blessitt and others were finding Christ and preaching to surfers and ski bums and groups of people who would later emerge as Christian songwriters (Keith Green) and pastors of soon-to-become umbrella churches (Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard, etc.). There was nothing inauthentic about it. It was very real for at least a large enough minority that took the ball and ran with it. Folks were being baptized on the beaches of Huntington and Manhattan and Venice, maybe even Newport, and for awhile the number one song on the charts was Judy Collins rendition of 'Amazing Grace' (still the best ever recorded).

The night Arthur Blessitt came through Albuquerque and preached at Hoffmantown there were hundreds and hundreds of mostly young people from all over the city who packed the auditorium. It was a magic night, a spiritual night, a Jesus-Movement-California-charismatic-magic night. By the end of the evening we were beside ourselves, basking in the love of God and Arthur Blessitt and freedom from our parents and their stale, mid-westernness (even in a southwestern town). We were moved to 'change the world.' The Coca-Cola commercials about wanting to 'teach the world to sing' came directly out of this experience that we were experiencing for ourselves on this night. And we were equipped. We were given rolls of stickers, little round red stickers that said things like 'Jesus loves you,' and told to go plaster them all over kingdom come.

A whole pack of youths marched out into the desert night air, across the street to this gas station, and, believing we had been given some kind of militant marching orders to 'spread God's love,' we plastered that gas station with these annoying stickers. I don't know if any damage was done other than a 1970's-style flash mob of young people lost in a delirious deluge of Pentacostal Power and a handful of stickers labeling everything from the cash register to the gas tanks outside with the words 'Jesus Saves.'

On Sunday morning we were told that the owner of the gas station was pissed. Our parents were pissed. Our pastor was pissed. I'm sure we were probably told God was pissed. I don't remember if Arthur Blessitt was at the church on Sunday or if he'd already taken up his cross and continued along his walk across America. I don't believe our actions were his fault.

Many, many years have passed since those days, and youth turns to adulthood and responsibility and the machinations of trying to make a living, doing things like running a gas station, or pastoring a church, or teaching school, or nursing. I am much older now, and I look back to those days as the beginning of my coming to understand how little I know about love. I've been told over and over again that 'God is love,' and frankly that's the only thing in my whole life that I know that I know that I know. But most of the rest of what I think I know, or have spent a lifetime trying to understand, isn't nearly so certain.

I love marriage. I apparently love it so much that I've done it twice, and may I assure you that though the second time around is by far better than the first, I am forever grateful for the experiences that have come before, for as we all know, it is our failures that teach us the deepest lessons.

My wife is perhaps the easiest person in the world to love. I love her deeply and completely. But there's a part of this love that is kind of like walking around like a circus clown with a necktie that's too long. You find yourself constantly tripping, always looking backwards at what might have gotten in your way without realizing it's your own stupid, self-inflicted noose.

The song says, "I wanna know what love is," and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in one of her sonnets that she loved Mr. Browning 'to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.' Ah, but it's my souls 'reach' that is the problem. Because I believe that God is love, I spend a great deal of time trying to find out who and what He is, so that I might find out what love is, how to live it and how to give it away. It's a full-time job.

So this is what I think (so far)...

I think that when Jesus told the folks who were listening to Him that they were to 'take up your cross and follow me,' He wasn't talking about bearing burdens, and He wasn't talking about a literal-Arthur Blessitt-walk-across-America kind of cross bearing. Those people knew nothing of what was to come for Jesus and the significance of 'the cross.' They 'did' know that the cross was where the very worst were sentenced to hang, dying a death of torture. Dying, dying, dying. Self-denial. That's it. That's love. 

To love God, to love Michelle, to love my children, to love my friends that I have coffee with and eat meals with and try to solve the worlds problems with, to love the homeless people that I sing for once a month and fool myself into believing I'm doing one good thing, and to love those I don't even know who I vehemently disagree with, has always meant getting rid of my own ego. This is not even brain surgery or rocket science to understand this. Love, real love, is self-denial. Putting them (all those I mentioned above) first. First! It doesn't even matter how easy or how hard that is. Doesn't matter. That's love. Anything else is not love. It's something, alright, but it isn't love.

I don't have any problem with loving myself. Never have. No one does. Those whom we describe as suffering from a lack of 'self-love' or 'self-esteem' or 'self-whatever' aren't lacking in an ability to love themselves. They just suffer from the same problem I suffer from; not knowing how to put 'others' first. Looking outward versus constantly gazing at one's own navel, thinking about how 'unloved' we feel, how lost we are, how hungry we are, how beautiful we are, or how lonely we are. There's a huge freaking world out there, and Jesus says that Economics 101 is this: He who would be first, be last. Got a box of donuts? Give 'em all away. Don't set aside the one you want for yourself! I do crap like that 'all the time!' Don't tell my ten year old son this, but I've eaten the last donut 'many' times when I knew in my heart I should have saved it for him. He's as skinny as a rail, and, well, I'm not.

I don't have a problem with fear and hate, or lust, or the desire to murder anybody. I'm as guilty of all that as you can get. I doubt that I've thought about murder as much as my wife has, but you really can't be married without having at least once or twice considered it. My PROBLEM is love. I'm even pretty sure that a lot of those times when I 'think' I'm being really loving is when I'm the most lost in my own damn self.

This thing of 'denying oneself,' getting rid of 'all' my ego, not just some of it, not just the chest-beating braggart loathsome 'self' but the whole of myself, all my ego, is the heart of becoming someone who loves, who understands love and understands God, and is no longer afraid of life or of unanswered prayer. I don't want to care about the things I want or the things I need. I don't even want to know more about love and become better at it because I'm convinced it's my only ticket to Heaven. I want to love because I believe that's the only way I'm supposed to live here, now, on this earth.

Thoreau said, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Wholeness is selflessness. Salvation isn't so much redemption of 'sin' as it is denial of 'self.' That is clear, and any other reading of 'the good news' is gnarled up in too much stuff so many of us have been taught for too long, and it's kept us from understanding what love is, and that's the only thing. You may not believe that, and that's fine. Perhaps you're further along the road than I am. But for me to love is to serve, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with clawing my way into Heaven, or even thinking of such things. That path has already been paved in stone, and the instruction manual is clear, at least to me. Finally. It's love. Love for my wife and children (easy); love for people who live on the other side of Earth who don't think or walk or talk or bathe like I do (harder); love for those who wish me ill or who would scheme of ways to bring down towers (seemingly impossible, but not); love for world leaders and corporate executives and temple money-changers (still, not impossible).

Almost always, when I get angry, it's because in one way or another I did not get my way. That's true whether with my wife, or with God, or with the pedal-to-the-metal fifteen year old in my rear-view mirror coming down my tailpipe and then whipping around me like a jet fighter while she's texting her bff. I have a friend who claims that when he's driving on the roads around town he is invisible. He does not let the desires of other drivers affect him at all, and his only concern is stealthily getting where he's going. No ego.

Arthur Blessitt is still alive today, and may have traveled clear around the world twenty times with his wooden cross, and God bless him for it. He's a happy guy with a smile a mile wide, and a desire to serve others in his heart. But I did not learn anything about God's love that night. In fact, I broke all the rules. Or, the one rule. And I've been trying ever since to learn how to do this thing called love that we all want and need so badly. I'm still not all that good at it, but dying to myself is my target. It may have brought me to a place where nobody asks me to sing anymore, and that's alright. I read a lot more books now, and the songs I do sing echo from a deep well of what I know so far about love. So far.

So, happy Valentine's Day, Michelle. I'm learning from you everyday. Happy Valentine's Day, God. I see you in the flowers and in the children and I hear you when the tenor sings 'Nessun Dorma,' and I feel you in me and around me and behind me and most often ahead of me, pulling and dragging me along, pointing from side to side all the people I'm failing to see or care about along the way. I know you'll continue to forgive me for that, so there's one burden I can unload myself of. This cross you've informed me of? I want to bear it gladly, be rid of myself, and bask in other's glory, and in yours.

And here's one more thing. If God is love, and I believe He is, and if He is the Creator of all things, and I believe He is even if He chose to use some kind of evolutionary process to do it, and if at the beginning of this cosmic Big Bang (yes, He snapped His fingers and there was a big bang, yes there was) He set in motion this spinning globe of blue sea and red clay and made man out of it for one purpose, that purpose is love. His for us, and ours for Him and for each other, and somewhere someone is bending down in the poorest part of the poorest town on the darkest side of Earth and loving someone and serving them, and God is as thrilled in that as he ever is with me in whatever I do here on the bright and wealthy side of His world, and why anyone there or here has to suffer at all may in more ways than I understand have to do with me, and my ability to take the last donut. But I'm learning.