4 minute read
Our Way of Loving the World Right Now
Heather Lanier
The cardinals flitted from the platform feeder to the ground, and the squirrels snagged crusts we tossed from the kids’ morning toast, and none of the backyard creatures knew that the humans were about to “shelter-in-place.”
On this March morning, a literal haze descended on our plot of earth as suddenly as a rumor: Lockdown forthcoming. Our phones had been pinging with texts and calls all morning. Did we have enough food for a month? friends wanted to know. My husband, not prone to panic or even quick movement, grabbed the keys and the hand sanitizer and split for the store.
I stayed with our girls, six and eight. “Let’s do morning meditation outside,” I told them. They cheered, maybe because morning meditation was new for them, maybe because so was this daily chaos—no school, no schedule, no clear workday for the parents, who now muttered the word pandemic in the kitchen.
The six-year-old handed a dull bell to the eight-year-old, then kept a shinier one for herself. We sat facing each other on the concrete patio. The two girls clanged their bells, piercing an octave higher than any bird.
The six-year-old wanted to chant Om. Not my practice, but okay. For sixty seconds, we chanted: Om. Aum. As in ow and aw. As in um and amen. As in, the sound that some mystics think holds all the cosmos, like a big bowl into which can fit every planet and person and fear and prayer.
Then I opened the book I consult most mornings. I read a little about a man named Jesus, the man I believe is God in human form. God with feet. God in sandals.
Sometimes the day’s passage is about how, if you welcome a child, you welcome God. Sometimes it’s about how, if someone is cruel, you cannot fix their cruelty with more cruelty. In other words, the Gospels contain plenty of kid-friendly content.
But on this day, the reading was about dirty hands. Namely, the dirty hands of the disciples of Jesus, who ate their food without washing.
The sun was rising over our A-frame roof, and the haze over the lawn was dissipating. I knew that when my husband returned from the store, he would carry bags into the garage for quarantining, wash his hands, wipe down the door handles with disinfectant, then wash his hands again, most of which was new protocol.
The Pharisees were aghast. How could Jesus let his students eat with filthy hands?
“This is a confusing one,” I said to my kids.
Jesus defended his dirty disciples. Nothing can be defiled, he said, from the outside. Only from the inside can we become dirty.
In other words, Dirty hands, don’t care, said my God incarnate.
I tried to explain that Jesus didn’t mean germs or viruses come from inside us. I touched my chest and said something about the heart. The six-year-old looked at me quizzically. The eight-year-old, I’d lost minutes ago. “What are we doing next?” she asked.
A few millennia of enlightened masters—folks who meditated for decades and hiked the mountains of truth and had their hair blown
white with revelation—they tell us that what pulses through this big, wild world is Infinite Love. Which means what pulses through us is Infinite Love. I haven’t yet perceived this truth, not on any ordinary day. So I especially didn’t on this March morning, while my husband went on what felt like an apocalyptic run for proteinsources, and panicky text messages piled undeleted on my pocketsized screen.
It didn’t dawn on me to tell my children this: What the man named Jesus means is, if you get sick, you are still beloved. Nothing outside of you can defile you, turn you unworthy, make you “unclean.” When Jesus lets his disciples scoop their fish with dirty fingers, he’s saying they are worthy just as they are. He’s saying, if you are covered with every sticky virus on the planet, you can still feast at the banquet that is Infinite Love. It’s your heart that determines your seat at the table of love. It’s your act of loving that brings you to love.
On this morning, my heart was a little infected with fear. Three hours north, portable morgues lined a parking lot in New York City. I wanted to keep my kids, myself, the whole world clean from every outside source. And yet, we had learned by then—we are also the outside source.
So this was our new way of loving the world: by not entering it. Not with our bodies. Yet we clanged our bells and chanted our oms beneath the oaks and among cardinals and squirrels, so we could enter the world a different way—with our hearts. Mine needed reminding: Love the world, so you remember how to love it. Come to the altar of the world with your big, wild, hopeful heart.
“Just know,” I told my kids, who were now standing up, peering into a canopy of bare branches, wondering what’s next for the day. “You still have to wash your hands. Okay?”
