Her fingers wrap around mine like a chord. Limbs darting up to tug at my linen, cotton billows, reaching out to declare: “You are mine.” Tenacious, yet layered with a heart like cream, Madeleine steals frames from faces in an instant. Translucent glass beads scattered about the floor save her from topples as she devours them with her finger folds. Snowy flesh. She is sitting better and better every day. At dawn each morning Daddy awakes to spend sleepy hours with her while I try and catch up from night waking. Enfolding one another in the day’s first light. This is our love.

“One Voice” by Calgary artist Connie Gibbens. Read her artist’s statement, where she describes her Circles theme, here. 

“We love wherever we can love, and the power of that love spreads until the circumference of the circle of love grows wider and wider. At least that has been my own experience, even though I know to my rue that the circumference of my love is still much too small.” 

- Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season

Long grey corridors dance
with candy cane stripes
choreographing
even-heeled steps
of close-mouthed
white coats.

today, inside,
it feels like a tomb
where condolences lie
like musty window-dressings.

it is here we are
met by unexpected blue-clad smiles
darting in and out from
melancholy sheets. 

it tastes like honey.
and the day is still beginning.

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st. paul’s hospital. september 25, 2006. during my mom’s cancer.

We welcomed Madeleine Jacoba Hope on September 2 at 9:15 AM.

9 lbs 11 oz. 72 hours of labour. Mom and baby are happy and healthy. Daddy says: “God help fathers of daughters.”

We are in love.

Softly now, you’re breaking my heart…

Grafton Bay, Bowen Island, last Friday evening 

My nephew Jesse Fin

This photo brought me to tears today. I miss this little man. I miss my family.

I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on marriage on the Listen Up blog today.

:::::::::::::

A few weeks ago I read author Brennan Manning on needing proof of God.  He sure doesn’t let us off the hook and I found his directness particularly refreshing:

“Trust that is at the mercy of the response it receives is a bogus trust. All is uncertainty and anxiety. All is precarious.

In trembling insecurity the believer pleads for and even demands tangible reassurances from the Lord that his affection be returned. If he does not receive them, he is disheartened, frustrated, maybe even convinced that it’s all over or that it never really existed…

What the sincere Christian has not learned is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or provide any certainty of its presence.”

Particularly, in light of marriage, I welcome Manning’s view.

Himself, a retired Catholic priest now married, Manning has lived in fidelity to God, first, and his wife, second.

I think this is the perfect example for marriage.

I often reflect on how without my understanding of fidelity to the unseen - to God - I would be at a loss pursuing emotional and physical fidelity to my spouse. Only a year-and-a-half into marriage and I experience our commitment to each other as a daily choice to love, a choice, not an emotion, and ultimately love rests in trust.

Trust is only true if it lacks circumstance. From Manning’s view, if I require endless reassurances of God’s love for me, I will be the same with my husband, and it is not a true love but rather an affection lacking trust. This kind of insecurity on either of our parts will wrestle our relationship to the ground. And it does, with frequency.

The Bible says “Perfect love casts out fear.”

To live in love, to nurture our marriages, we must trust each other with abandon. We can’t hold back. I must look into my lover’s eyes and confess: “I am yours, body and soul, in sickness and health, in hardship and good times.” I must grab him in my most miserable moments and declare my love.

It’s counter to one part of our nature and life-giving to another, nourishing the spirit and annihilating selfishness. It feels backward in the moment but slowly, over time, it will become a new habit, a new way of being.

It’s the way I want to live.

button, handmade with love at the regional assembly of text’s button making station

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY LOVE!

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.  And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

–  Harold Whitman