I have occasionally referred to a communication style I call ‘the compassionate frying pan.’ Direct, possibly jarring, but with heart.  I have sometimes employed it, especially when teaching, and other times I have been the recipient of it… when the message that is needed isn’t coming through any other way. I’ve received it from well-intentioned friends, mentors, and colleagues and I’ve read it in words on the page. So clever, God is, to find the way we need to hear something…

In this case, the trio of Otis Moss, III, Mary Oliver, and Teresa of Ávila, teamed up to proverbially clunk me on the head and heart. I will share their wisdom here.

The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.
–Teresa of Ávila–

Moments

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.

Mary Oliver   ‘Felicity’   2016

Our spiritual experience of our world can never be fully explained, written down, completed.  At the very end of his life, Howard Thurman … gave an interview with the BBC. He said, “Religious experience is dynamic.  It’s fluid, it’s effervescent, it’s yeasty… The religious experience goes on experiencing.  So whatever creed there is, whatever theology, it’s always a little out of date.”  Our beliefs and our practices, like our proudest institutions, will always be “a little out of date.”
–Otis Moss, III, Dancing in the Darkness—

As a general rule, I don’t think caution is pathetic, not at all, but I understand Mary Oliver’s point and Teresa of Ávila’s too. And I know that too much thought on my part can launch a spiral that stays internal. Love, the outward action, the turning toward, redirects the spiral into something that might serve a greater good, a larger whole, in some way that I might never know or even be able to imagine…The call is to serving, not to knowing or predicting the outcome. As a trusted friend said recently, “We can know the next right thing, even if we have no idea what will come of it.”

Headlong is Yes and Do and Try and Show Up and Offer and Listen–to whoever is there, to those who know you, believe in you, and stand with/walk with as you listen too for the still small voice that “brings us directly into contact with the inalienable presence of beauty in the soul.” (John O’Donohue, Beauty, p. 75–another good read these winter days.)

May we each hear the voice of Love calling forth Love in the ways, the language, the medium, that we each need. And may the many spirals meet where all converges…at the Centre of Centres where our “religious experience can go on experiencing” in the company of others, also led there by a heart stirring path and the faith that headlong might well bring about more than we can hope for or imagine.