only loving
I don’t know what it is about a free t-shirt, but when the emcee in the arena on watch party night for hockey invites us to get to our feet and make some noise, promising t-shirts, we stand, a whole crowd of us fans hollering like hyenas, waving our arms in the air above our heads. Some even leave their seats, running like long lost lovers down to the bottom of the stands.
I can’t help it; immediately I think of all the social settings and situations, the relational opportunities, for which most of us stay so carefully closed—shuttered and curtained and locked up tight, and I think, it’s funny, the things that inspire our open-armed exuberance.
Even Adam, who because of Autism dis-connects, who got flat-out frustrated tonight at the dinner table when Kevin asked too many curious questions about his day, stands next to me now working to say, “I want a t-shirt please…I want a t-shirt please…I want a t-shirt please,” thinking maybe he’ll be heard all the way up here by the young logo-clad entertainment team lobbing shirts from way down there.
Mama-me, noticing how the team kindly caters to the very young, the innocent-sweet, I want to wave my arms above my head and conjure a sign that says it bold, Autism talking, right here! I want to tell them all how tender he still is, my boy suddenly turned young man, who looks only to be at the peak of everything. Him, handsome and tall and angular and lean, reaching over with one hand to touch my ear while he cups the other over his mouth, still chanting, “I want a t-shirt, please.”
How is it that we still don’t know how it touches God, how utterly tender toward us He must feel, when we who have to work to pray, who feel twist-tongued and sheepish about it, finally take Him up on grace? Even when we’ve turned love and relationship into some sort of transaction, isn’t it true that He still loves to hear us speak? I watch Adam’s face, listen, listen to that deep-sweet voice, and wanting desperately to wrap my mixed-up, messed-up arms around him, to shelter him, to champion him, I know it. Crinkle a page of scripture open and it’s easy to see, how God’s all father-at-the-table-with-the-questions.
Where are you? Why are you so afraid? What do you want me to do for you?
What I would have given, just an hour ago, for Adam to form real sentences for us in conversation! But he dis-connects and probably doesn’t even understand all the reasons why, and here I am now, only loving him.
We are all, born as we are of this broken place, on some spiritual spectrum of dis-connection, only learning as we heal how to live in love with God, and this I know: He’s not far away from any of us but only loving, waiting for us to reach out and find Him.
Adam’s hands twitch out in front of him now, his long, lean arms stretching, reaching. It’s like he’s walking blind, handling the empty air with his fingers, trying to see somehow. He looks like a child, longing to be lifted, and the irony is not lost on me, that the one who never reaches for an embrace now reaches, enthusiastically, for a free t-shirt.
The whole thing reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote, that,
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.
I am jerked back to our broken, failed attempt at conversation over dinner.
“What did you learn at school today?” Kevin had asked Adam as we gathered, when carefully but pointedly, Adam put down his spoon, letting it drop with an abrupt clank against the plate.
“Cooking.”
The one word seemed to be all he felt inclined to say, had time to say, and this itself was a hardship. Our son sat curled over his plate, poised to get on with eating, poised, as I can so often be over a day, feeling justified in abbreviating my prayers.
“You did some cooking today?”
“Yes.” Adam reached again for his spoon. Conversation over as far as he was concerned, he lifted another bite to his lips. Consume, consume, consume, it can crowd out any effort to relate.
“What did you learn about cooking?”
Always, always around our table the training for connection, the questions, patiently proffered, re-orienting to relationship.
Tell me: Where are you?
Pull out God’s questions from scripture, Ann Voskamp has written in her books, and you’ll discover a father training his kids for connection, re-orienting for relationships.
Adam had dropped his spoon again, a little more abruptly still, his back slamming quietly, just so, against his chair, for fear of arousing wrath, his body speaking in place of his voice, something like, no time no time no time…I’m eating I’m eating I’m eating!
So many rebellious speeches–I’m re-membering now, I’ve made with my posture instead of my words, me so busy striving after good I’ve no time to try talking to the one who actually is good, who by that nature gives every good.
Even the free t-shirts.
“Tablespoon.” The word fell hard, like a rock ground in the hand for hurling, Adam’s voice all full of grit and trouble. Quickly, he took up the spoon yet again, quickly brought the good, given food across his lips, before another re-orienting question could be asked of him. Funny thing about captivity, how we can’t even feel our own chains.
“Tablespoon?” Kevin looked at me, but I could only shrug, not knowing. “Did you learn about tablespoons today? Or, a tablespoon of what?”
Adam’s body became a glare, a stomped foot, a slammed door. I don’t know why he thinks he can’t eat and also have a conversation—it’s as we go that we relate, and love, that we abide, but somehow, we humans can always make a transaction out of feasting, paring it down. Somehow, I can so easily believe that because I’m holding the spoon, I’m feeding myself.
Adam’s fingers had curled, his hands becoming fists, closed against our table.
“Yes,” only this last word, and not quite even uttered in the affirmative, this really more like a grunt, as though in rebellion against relationship even personhood dissolves.
Yes? Yes what?
But we let it rest, or Kevin did, anyway, glancing again at me, his chest heaving with a sigh.
And now here we are, and Adam beside me, repeating, “I want a t-shirt, please…”
So, Kevin, Father only loving, reaches high now, his arms longer, his perspective better than Adam’s, easily snagging a flung shirt right out of the air above his head. Turning toward our son, he smiles, says gently only, “Adam? Here you go,” because the loving Father keeps on giving good gifts, even for all the time it takes us kids to understand that the actual best gift is knowing Him.
