Margaret's Bench -- July and August 2007
(… a continuation of thoughts from Margaret’s Bench of
April and
June. Updated June 2008.)
I slipped Tom Waits’ Heart Attack and Vine
into my car’s CD player. On that October afternoon, Waits’
gravelly voice and diamond revelations from the grit of city
street life felt like perfect accompaniment to the fir trees,
horse barns, and small-town neighborhoods that I passed on my
drive into town. As I entered the Safeway parking lot, “Jersey
Girl,” one of my all-time favorite love songs, began to play:
got no time for the corner boys,
down in the street makin’ all that
noise,
don’t want no whores on eighth avenue,
cause tonight i’m gonna be with you.
(Read
all the lyrics to “Jersey Girl”)
I pulled into a slot, then stayed to hear the
whole song before going to the store.
Near the end of “Jersey Girl,” during cascades of sha la la’s,
a man and a woman crossed the Safeway parking lot together,
walking away from me. They were both a little overweight—the
word ‘dumpy’ came to mind—and dressed in down-market T-shirts
and knit pants. They were ordinary-looking, and also a little
funny-looking. They were a pair in a special way. They had the
same oval shape, and they were holding hands.
While the song ended and I watched that couple walk away, I had
a revelation. I saw this pair—individually and together—as
lovable right down to the marrow of their bones.
“Lovable” is both the right word and the wrong word to describe
what I saw. Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving, “What
most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially
a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal,” which is
exactly what makes it the wrong word. The quality revealed to me
in this couple didn’t depend on popularity or sex appeal. The
dictionary definition of loveable comes closer: “Having
characteristics that attract love or affection.” (American
Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition.)
It’s loveable’s underlying parts that make it the right
word. Love + able. In that couple, I saw both their
inborn ability to inspire love and their inborn ability to feel
and express love. Loving was as much a part of them as walking
and talking.
My revelation didn’t make me love that couple. And it didn’t
reveal anything to me about their relationship, except that it
included holding hands while crossing the Safeway parking lot.
My revelation had to do with how they were made and what they
were made of. It felt like an epiphany. It filled me with joy.
Then I went into the grocery store, and I saw everyone that way.
Every single person in the store was revealed as lovable:
deeply, purely love + able. Stupid-looking people, smart-looking
people, evil-looking people, good-looking people,
self-satisfied-looking people; happy-looking people,
tired-looking people, people with children, and the children
themselves. All of them. I thought that maybe I appeared
different, too, because some of them seemed to be staring back
at me while I did my shopping. I felt both exposed and fearless.
Both alive and outside the bounds of time.
I suppose I was having a mystical experience. Mystical
experiences are notoriously difficult to describe. The plain
words set down here are not adequate, even in my own eyes, and
yet I’m loath to gussy them up for effect. Descriptions of other
people’s mystical experiences never did much for me, so I know
that mine might not do much for anyone else.
Still, there it was.
By the next day, the glow around those Safeway moments had
faded. People looked pretty much the same as before. But I’d had
the experience, and the news it conveyed stayed with me. What I
learned didn’t feel like belief or faith in something that can’t
be known. Didn’t feel like assurances from the pulpit. Rather,
it felt—and feels—like knowledge, drawn from experience.
People are love + able. It’s how we’re made, as basic to our
selves as DNA is to our bodies. It’s true of everybody on earth,
whether I personally love them, hate them, or care nothing about
them at all. It’s true whether they love me, hate me, or care
nothing about me at all.
I haven’t yet managed to feel unconditional love for everyone on
earth. Hate and indifference remain part of my internal make-up.
Still, seeing the truth with my own eyes makes a difference.
When I told a Christian friend about my mystical experience at
Safeway, she commented that it sounded as if I briefly saw with
the “eyes of God.” That, for a few moments, I saw people the way
God sees us.
Putting it that way helps me interpret and process the
experience. And putting it that way also makes me uncomfortable.
I’m generally uneasy around personifications of God. To say that
I saw with the eyes of God feels like fitting God with yet
another mask. Besides, even granting divine eyes, who can tell
what God sees?
And yet, for me, the experience did provide a
hint about the nature of the Cosmic DNA.
More on this subject at another time...
-- Margaret
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