Love Is Holding, Not Grasping

Five Good Things for February

Background image: Studies of Hands by Leonardo da Vinci

Hi friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot about love this month. Not the commercialized, capitalist kind that so often crescendoes around Valentine’s Day, but a quieter, richer kind.

I have been particularly struck, recently, by the notion that a truly loving relationship requires space, freedom, and a certain amount of separation.

Henri Nouwen says it like this in his book, Clowning in Rome:

A mature human intimacy requires a deep and profound respect for the free and empty space that needs to exist within and between partners and that asks for a continuous mutual protection and nurture.

In other words: love requires space, and we do well when we nurture and protect it.

It’s so easy to hold the ones we love with a tight, white-knuckled grasp. We do this and we call it loving, but what we’re really doing is fearing.

I know, because I’ve done this to people I’ve loved, and people I’ve loved have done this to me.

What I know now is that being grasped tightly feels like love at first, but the moment you start stretching out, trying to get comfortable, you begin to realize there’s not as much space as you had once thought.

One of Jesus’ BFFs understood our tendency to do this, and reminded us that fear has nothing to do with love. Yet here we are two thousand years later still trying to control other people and conform them to our own image.

Love isn’t like that.

Love is smashing the mirror and letting our loved ones go free.

Love is moving our loved ones towards flourishing, even when it looks different than our own.

Love is an open hand, an embodied capaciousness, a tender space between you and another, a wide-open meadow.

Love is my three-year-old walking around the house, parroting: “You be you, and I’ll be me!”

Love is my six-year-old telling me: “It’s okay, Mama—we can like different things!”

Love is a constant relinquishing, again and again and again.

Love is a deep breath, a lightness, a freedom.

Recently, coming out of my own season of feeling squashed and suffocated, I had someone tell me she would not grasp me tightly.

It was such a simple promise, and yet I cried openly at the generosity of her words.

May it be so for all of us.

May we tend to the scared parts of ourselves that are tempted to cling to others so tightly.

May we loosen our grip. May we learn to relinquish.

May we repent of the ways we’ve feared and clung and controlled and called it love.

May we understand more and more what it is to live with one another in what Henri Nouwen calls, “a free dance.”

This relationship no longer is a fearful clinging to each other but a free dance, allowing space in which we can move forward and backward, form constantly new patterns, and see each other as always new.

What a gift.

Five Good Things:

1. Diana Butler Bass
   wrote this beautiful piece on how we can move forward over the next four years with hope and intention. In a time when the bad news feels constant, these words are grounding. And for my fellow writers:
   Lore Wilbert
   ’s words on platforms, metrics, and doing the hard work of showing up consistently over a long period of time.

2. I loved this conversation¹ between Rainn Wilson and Nadia Bolz-Weber on community, connection, grace, and healing. And this convo about curiosity as a spiritual practice healed me from the inside out this month.

3. I made this white chicken chili with leftover rotisserie chicken, and it blew my mind. Also, this creamy chicken and wild rice soup, and allll the crusty bread.

4. I’m finding a lot of solace in books like

   Erin H Moon
   ’s I’ve Got Questions. It’s one of those books that made me feel so much less alone in a lonely faith season. Other good reads this month:
   Sarah Bessey
   ’s Field Notes for the Wilderness and The Critical Journey.

5. I’ve been pulling out my feel-good, have-a-good-cry, comfort movies lately: Little Women, C’mon C’mon, Coda, and Wild Hearts Can’t be Broken (does anyone else remember this movie?).

May you each find people and spaces where you can be held with an open palm, and do the same for others.

So much grace and peace to you,

Krista

1. A conversation to be listened to away from the children or with earbuds. Nadia has no problem with the swears, which I find refreshing, but some might find offensive.