The Slow Way Newsletter: Slowness is the Speed of Love
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
An Invitation to the Speed of Love
As I write this, Ace and I are returning from a few days of visiting my parents in Texas, where my dad continues to undergo treatment for his brain cancer. I have been trying to get there once a month, and this time I came for an important appointment with his neurologist. I’m sure most of you out there have walked through cancer with someone you love, whether from a distance or up close. And if you have, you know. It’s a terrible disease, slow in the worst ways.
I write a lot about slowness here. It’s in the name, right? We are here to talk about rejecting our culture’s demand that life move a pace that feels more comfortable: Get us our food quicker, please. Allow us to work longer and harder so that more money gets made. Let’s gorge ourselves with entertainment that comes quickly and easily so we don’t have to consider the places in us that hurt.
The choice to slow it all down is not necessarily a choice to make life more enjoyable or exciting. It’s simply a choice to make life more real, less sanitized, exposed. When we can’t fast forward through to the other side, we have to feel the reality of this moment, its joy and its grief. The slow way forces us to move through to the other side at the speed of love. And love will break your heart sometimes.
I know every time I leave my dad behind in Texas and return to the life I’m building with my husband and boys in New Jersey, that he will be more sick when I return. That the next visit will be more difficult. This isn’t because I lack hope, it’s because I want to move at the speed of love. And love demands we hold the reality in front of us with care and gentleness and honesty. This trip my dad did his best to summon his strength. He told some good jokes. He sat with us at the table when he could. He allowed Ace to crawl on him in bed, even when every part of his body hurt and Ace wasn’t great at being gentle. My dad got into the hot tub with Ace and tried to enjoy it. There were beautiful moments, but most of them were hard. And life doesn’t really work the way a movie does, where meaning shows itself loud and clear in the midst of ordinary conversation and the trimming of his toe nails (my job when I’m in town). The truth is that meaning is usually more easily deciphered later when there’s time and space to look back.
When we move at the speed of love we move slow enough to recognize that meaning is close by, but we don’t always find it in the moment. Life is life: messy, complicated. It seems to me that suffering is that way too. There’s no rule sheet for making the journey of suffering easier or clearly meaningful. Sometimes it’s just awful with no redemption. And sometimes there are moments that glimmer. Or maybe moments that glimmer later, when you look back with the hope of all that would come after.
This weekend I was reading through Rachel Held Evans’ final book Wholehearted Faith, finished by Jeff Chu, and I was taken by something small she and Jeff wrote in the chapter called “Wilderness”: “Maybe one of the lessons is that the wilderness is a place where we can’t rely on the familiar, which can seem like a hardship but might also be an invitation -- an invitation into the reality of our existence, and invitation into the truth of our vulnerability.”
Sometimes we’re asked to go slowly through the wilderness, through the long, difficult middle. And sometimes there’s no immediate meaning in the suffering, in the long haul through the ache of it. Redemption is rarely immediate. But there is no way to the other side except to go through the slow, difficult middle. That’s where the reality is. Or, as we like to call it around here: the Really Real. The truth of our vulnerability is an invitation if we let it be.
Whether there’s always meaning to be found in suffering I can’t quite say. But I can say there’s truth there. The slow way is the way of love, and the way of love is always going to hurt. But it’s going to be real, and it’s going to transform the world. I believe that. Do you?
a slow practice
Let’s take the time today to consider one thing in your life that feels extra hard right now. Maybe it’s a relationship that is complicated and difficult, a job that is asking more of you than you have to give, or a life-event that there’s no way out of.
If something comes to mind for you go ahead and find a way to write it down. You can use a sticky note, or if you’re feeling extra crafty, you can paint it on a rock, or make it into something small you can carry with you or keep near the place you sit for prayer.
Take your sticky note / crafty thing and hold it in your hand. Find a quiet place to sit and reflect. Take a few deep breaths and physically hold your hard thing to your heart.
Breathe in: You make a way through the wilderness.
Breathe out: Help me go straight through the middle, no matter how hard it hurts.
Breathe in: You make a way through the wilderness.
Breathe out: I am invited into the truth of my vulnerability.
Breathe in: You make a way through the wilderness.
Breathe out: Teach me to go at the pace of love.
Breathe in: You make a way through the wilderness.
Breathe out: Bring meaning to this hard thing in my life.