My cup runneth over

My cup runneth over August 4, 2015

If you’ve read my blog recently or happen to be one of the unfortunate souls being subjected to my endlessly sappy Facebook feed, it should be pretty clear by now that I’ve lost my damn mind and fallen head over heels in love. I promise to return you to our regularly scheduled programming of exploring the intersection of being queer and Christian, speaking truth to power and other justice shaningating but for at least one more post…sigh 🙂

As a woman of faith, it pains me to confess that I did not believe the bountiful feast now before me would ever be mine. Sure, I believed that this sort of love was out there, the kind where mind, body and spirit between two people are incomprehensibly compatible. I know others who are seated at such a table. But for myself, I dared not hope for more than a simple meal, neither spicy nor bland, neither sumptuous nor spare, but from which I expected to always rise still hungry.

Yesterday, I was biding my time in a local pizza joint as my laundry took a tumble at the laundromat next door. (This regular ritual of relaxing with a book, beer and breadsticks makes an otherwise annoying chore an anticipated joy!) While waiting for the wash and sipping a fine beverage and picking at my lunch, I was sharing sweet and saucy texts with my beloved who lives over 500 miles away. Space and time began to bend and it seemed, if only briefly, that she was beside me in the booth. Anyone in the pub who might have glanced my way would’ve surely thought I looked utterly mad, mooning over an invisible lover who was clearly present to me and only me.

Nearby, a couple sat in a quiet nook, eyes glazed over in the glow of their smart phones. A weary waitress took an order from a man on a weathered barstool. At a table beside me slouched a father with two young children, a grim dullness draped across his shoulders with the weight of a thousand empty hours.

And here I sat, every mundane, significant or purposeful thing I was doing gently wrapped in and permeated by a palpable golden light – each moment pulsating with the ineffable energy of new and complete love.  Hot damn and hallelujah, my cup runneth over!  

In that moment, I realized that the only thing more I could wish for would be that everyone, everyone, everyone could drink from this wellspring of love and life. See, in that moment of personal bliss, sitting in my ratty little booth, apparently but not actually alone, I ached to share my portion with the nearby family, the tired waitress, and the checked-out couple. I wished that those around me could dwell in the thin place into which I’ve stumbled. So too I hope, when the golden light begins to simmer and my own shoulders sag again with daily life, that someone else will share their portion with me.    

Looking back at this post, I wonder – what more can I hope for in my walk and work? If each of us, in our individual lives, knows with a peace that surpasses understanding that we are loved beyond our wildest imaginations (and if merely in the banality of mortal life, how incomprehensibly more so in the gaze of our Creator) wouldn’t we all want to share that love with the whole world? This, I suppose is the goal of my wonky wrestling with words and flinging myself at the world – that love would make moot all of our justice seeking shenanigans and we’d be liberated to finally live into the greatest commandment.

So let it be written, so let it be done.


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