March Mayhem

Here we are in the middle of March. It is surprising to me how rapidly the days go by; sunrise, sunset, quickly flow the day, from the words of Fiddler on the Roof. And that movement even includes those times when we find ourselves singing the blues in the night. Anita has gone to help Dorian bathe and clip the two watch Scotties and I am here manning the ramparts by myself. Things can be rather quiet when I am here by myself. I had to have a short fight with my memory and the computer to get this blog started but I did it and I did it by myself in the dark; so there is some sense of accomplishment that I am now doing what I started out to do.

I have studied my meditation for tomorrow and am now doing this blog entry and will wander around the house in a few more moments just to get myself moving. I can hear some typing mistakes but that ought to make your interpretation interesting. I will edit in a few hours and try to make this entry more readable.

Last Saturday, I had a wedding in a setting that I had not been before. It worked out fine and I did the job without making the service memorable by my mistakes. Weddings and funerals are always tense and me doing them blind makes my tension even higher; I want to respond when I am asked but I surely want to be able to conduct their service with dignity. So far I have been able to do that but I feel pretty tired when the service is over and I am always glad to finish and be on my way home. I simply refuse to give in; you don’t give in, you just keep getting up. I keep telling myself to never give up and so far I haven’t given up.

The wedding used that marvelous Pauline description of love as a part of the service (First Corinthians, chapters 12-13). I imagine that it is used at almost every wedding because it is so appropriate. It is so popular and appealing that we can miss the muscular message that it contains. Right from the beginning of the poem Paul makes it clear that if love is not present, heroic deeds will not rescue our relationship or us. Love is neither pale nor weak.

Even moving mountains and making great sacrifices won’t get the job done. Muscular love is required to make the deed, however dazzling, really mean anything. The muscle of the love in the poem says that. Love is not about heroic acts or moving mountains or stringing banners across the sky. Love is about common courtesy and mutual respect; that is what muscular love gives to life and to relationships. The grand gestures and noble deeds are nothing without courtesy grace and respect.

And those three ingredients are sadly missing in many, if not most, of the relationships we encounter in everyday living. Our politics seems to run on hate for the opposite viewpoint rather than finding a common love and concern for country. And the fact that we citizens allow this to continue day after day without a significant confrontation to our government stuns and surprises me. Muscular love is about how we treat each other every day, in every situation we encounter that day, about every person we encounter that day.

Love is not about being heroic and winning every situation we encounter. Muscular love is seeing to it that we all win because when your partner wins, we all win. Whether person, family, job, or church, love is about approaching life and others with courtesy and respect. I hope that I can remember that and I also hope that our culture remembers it. Enduring, believing, and hoping for all good things are living with a muscular love that can make a big difference.