The Slow Way: Give Back Your Heart To Itself
Thanksgiving is a ritual we practice each year. Another chance to reach beneath the losses we carry, to discover a good and holy love.
There is something adorable about middle school boys, despite their bad rap. I think it’s that they’re like puppies, incapable of sitting still without pawing one another and rolling onto their backs instinctively, no reason needed. But they’re sweet, even if they are a little smelly, and I get a kick out of them. This past Wednesday night, between the gaps in their attention and their rolling on the carpet, I managed to have them read the Jewish Sh’ma from Deuteronomy Chapter 6, and Jesus’s interpretation of that formative text in Matthew Chapter 22. This passage in Deuteronomy, which invites us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and might is a foundational confession of the Jewish faith. And Jesus adds to it, as an answer to his critics who are asking what could possibly be the most important of all the commandments. He tacks on another foundational idea: “And [love] your neighbor as yourself.”
“If someone were to come to you and say, What does it mean to live like a Christian? What does it mean to you to follow Jesus in your life, how would you answer?” I asked that crew of boys. And then I wrote it down for them, as I do over and over, in hopes that someday they just might remember: Love God, Love your neighbor, Love yourself.
“They need each other,” I said. “Sometimes we love God by loving our neighbor. Sometimes we love our neighbor by loving ourselves. Sometimes when we learn to love ourselves we find that God is there helping us.”
The great Mr. Rogers said it this way:
You know the toughest thing is to love someone who has done something mean to you. Especially when that somebody has been yourself. Have you ever done anything mean to yourself? Well it's very important to look inside yourself and find that loving part of you. That’s the part of you you must take good care of and never be mean to. Because that’s the part of you that allows you to love your neighbor. And your neighbor is anyone you happen to be with, at any time of your life. Respecting and loving your neighbor can give everybody a good feeling.
What is the part of you that allows you to love your neighbor? What is the part of you that you must take good care of and never be mean to?
Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” begins like this:
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself . . .
This Thanksgiving, my hope for us is not simply that we enter this week with a sense of gratitude, but that we enter it with a gentleness toward ourselves. That on the day we gather with those we love, feasting, and facing (perhaps?) some challenging relationships we’d rather not face. My prayer is that you might first smile and welcome yourself. Invite her to sit down and feast.
Gratitude is a mysterious practice, one that begins in the most painful places — the losses, the failures, the things we’ve been grieving that we never wanted to grieve. But the reality is that if every loss is a container filled with a story, the pain of our lives at the surface of the barrel. Often there is a gift underneath the pain waiting to be discovered. There is no magic way to discover the gift underneath the pain. It’s really just a practice, to reach through the reality of our hurt and look for the solid and good thing waiting.
Thanksgiving is a ritual we practice with others. The great thing about ritual is that it comes over and over, whether or not we’re ready for it. So each year we’re given another chance to do more than skirt above the surface of the day. After all, anyone can eat a meal. It takes intention to feast, though. It takes courage to celebrate the good in our lives, especially when the days that led to this one have been especially painful.
So this is my question for you: Where do you find yourself this Thanksgiving? Are you ready to reach below the sorrow of your life in order to find the gift underneath?
As Mr. Rogers said, We can be mean to ourselves. But the act of looking for the loving part of you? That’s the work of gratitude. And when we learn to take good care of the loving part of us, we build the strength to show up on these ritual days: the Thanksgivings that lead to Christmas that lead to New Year’s Days and birthdays and anniversaries that aren’t, the days that will never come again, and underneath the loss is a good and holy love that says, there is more than suffering here. There is goodness too.
So this Thanksgiving, may we greet ourselves “arriving / at [our] own door, in [our] own mirror / and each will smile at the other’s welcome.” This Thanksgiving, may our practice of gratitude begin with kindness toward the loving part of ourselves. And there, may we find the courage to love “anyone [we] happen to be with,” which is to say, our neighbor.
As Walcott writes: “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart / to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.”
And may the loving of our ourself and our neighbor teach us to feast with the One who gives all good things, even in the dark cold days, where the good is always underneath, waiting to be discovered.
A Slow Practice
Today I want us to sit with some good words about the practice of Thanksgiving and the joy of abundance. Let’s spend some time with this paragraph from the the late Episcopal priest and epicurean, Rober Farrar Capon. Read this aloud slowly one time.
"[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being--a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium--the long Session that brings us nearly home."
Sit and consider what speaks loudest to you in Capon’s words.
Now read it aloud again.
"[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being--a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium--the long Session that brings us nearly home."
What is standing out to you in this passage? Is there anything in particular you wonder about? Is there anything that makes you uncomfortable? Why or why not?
Read it one more time.
"[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being--a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium--the long Session that brings us nearly home."
Is there something God wants to say to you through this paragraph, something about yourself or celebration or abundance that you can take with you into this week?
I’d love for us to end our time today by practicing thanksgiving. This is a prayer I love taken from the Carmina Gadelica and found in The Celtic Vision, by Esther De Waal. Let’s pray it slowly together. And as we go from here this week, I hope we’ll come back to it. As we give our whole sense, our whole mind, our whole soul, may we find the courage to be good to the loving part of us. And so to practice the work of Jesus as we feast around our Thanksgiving tables, and into all the days that follow.
Thanks be to Thee, Jesu Christ, For the many gifts Thou has bestowed on me, Each day and night, each sea and land, Each weather fair, each calm, each wild.
I am giving Thee worship with my whole life, I am giving Thee assent with my whole power, I am giving Thee praise with my whole tongue, I am giving Thee honour with my whole utterance.
I am giving Thee reverence with my whole understanding, I am giving Thee offering with my whole thought, I am giving Thee praise with my whole fervour, I am giving Thee humility in the blood of the Lamb.
I am giving Thee love with my whole devotion, I am giving Thee kneeling with my whole desire, I am giving Thee love with my whole heart, I am giving Thee affection with my whole sense; I am giving Thee existence with my whole mind, I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all gods.
Take some time to make this prayer your own.
Some Notes:
Robert Farrar Capon’s quote is taken from his lovely book about feasting: The Supper of the Lamb. If you want to think more about faith, feasting, and delights, this is the book for you.
I adore Esther de Waal, whose book The Celtic Way of Prayer, first pointed me to the Carmina Gadelica.
You can find all of Derek Wallcot’s poem at The Marginalian, where you can also hear it read aloud through On Being’s poetry project.
This Advent, beginning next Saturday, The Slow Way newsletter will be in your inbox as reposts of the transcripts of the first five episodes of The Slow Way Podcast, which include five original poems written for the season by yours truly. Those episodes will re-run leading up to the Christmas holidays.
After Christmas, my podcast and newsletter will go silent as I take some time to focus my attention and energy on finishing my book manuscript. If you are a paid-subscriber to The Slow Seven, you will continue to hear from me every two weeks. I’ll be sharing what I’m reading, thinking about, and listening to. And I’ll keep you updated on the book. Don’t worry, though. Just like the tulip bulbs, The Slow Way Project will be waiting under the cold ground. It will come back fresh and green and good in April. Thanks for trusting me enough to give me breaks. I promise to write a book I’m proud of with the time I’m away from here.