The Slant of Love
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” -Emily Dickinson.
Today is the second Sunday of Advent, a season of waiting and the beginning of the church calendar year.
It’s the Sunday of love.
The dictionary defines slant as “slope or lean in a particular direction; diverge or cause to diverge from the vertical or horizontal.” or “present or view (information) from a particular angle.” (google define)
To explore the slant of love, we are practicing slant (diverging from what is typically done.) I’ve recorded an audio meditation with five Thomas Merton quotes about love. I think they meet the criteria of Emily Dickinson’s quote, “tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.”
We are using Thomas Merton’s meditations and thoughts about love to tell about love, but tell it slant. The whole meditation is 6 minutes and 42 seconds long. I hope you’ll listen and see what invitation and shimmering words you might find.
(If you like this, most of my spiritual direction sessions include practices like this. I take a few minutes before each session to choose a reading, prayer, poem, or blessing, and we see what treasures and learning it might hold. You can always schedule a complimentary first session right here)
The Slant of Love: A Guided Meditation
The Readings:
All of these are quotes from various writings of the modern monk and mystic Thomas Merton.
Reading 1:
“The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Reading 2:
“Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.”
Reading 3:
“True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit.”
Reading 4:
“If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
Reading 5:
“…our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business, and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.”
A slant blessing for love
May the sparkle, shimmers, and slant of love enliven you in unexpected ways. May you, as Merton suggests, “let those you love be themselves perfectly” while “seeking their good”-and “letting all the secondary effects take care of themselves.” May you love what is good in yourself. May the love open your eyes to the worthiness of all we love and struggle to love.
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
Cassandra at the Wedding was written and published in 1962. It’s a complex, well-written story about twin sisters Cassandra and Judith, on the day before and the day of Judith’s wedding. The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of Cassandra and Judith. Reading about the same events from different perspectives is always so interesting. The experience of two people of the same events is always quite different and helps us understand better the full picture. This book is short, well-written, and, at times, surprisingly humorous.
All Creation Waits by Gayle Boss
This book is 25 readings for Advent. Each day is a short essay about how animals prepare for and survive winter. Day 1 is a turtle; it was fascinating, and my kids and I learned things we didn’t know. We’ve also read about muskrats, brown bears, and chickadees. It’s a thoroughly different Advent book, but one I highly recommend.
I found some interesting and slant definitions of love. Read each slowly and see if there is one that resonates with you. Maybe you jot it down on a piece of paper and read it daily over the next week. See what invitation to new seeing you might uncover.
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality-not as we expect it to be but as it is-is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
Frederick Buechner
Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.
Thomas a Kempis