Twenty years from now Ill be 45 and the blond in my beard will be gray. My memory may be even more selective. And their will be people that I will have given myself over to. My friend mentioned this idea today that involved trinitarian economics, an idea of gifting to people the things we own-like the Father has gifted his Son.
Twenty years ago I was five and I had a green jacket and overalls. My only fear was that there might be a rake in the leaf pile I was about to jump into like last time. And their was people that I gave myself over to in trust. My dad would walk ahead of my sister and I in the shops we went to. Reaching back his hands we would run and grab one of his rough hairy paws with both of ours, like he was ours.
Twenty-five years of living makes you aware of one thing, whose hand your holding. Who am I reaching back for and who am I reaching out to? Is their hand safe? And the answers to those questions need context. They need a story. They need people risking their love for one another to find themselves sharing in it. Merton has said that sharing is the law of God’s inter-life. This kind of movement is where I want to lean toward and be consumed by. God’s cyclone of passion and grace is tying us together with mutual love. It is the way by which we know ourselves and the world as a whole to be loved and understood and wanted and cherished. We were made to be ours in God-like the first humans and the first christians we are the first fruits of the creational economy. It is bursting forward with posibility and nuance and love and what nexts?
Isn’t that always the question… what next? But it can’t be in these days of hope and present-risenness. Maybe the question we raise as the tribe of the set free is, What now? Not in twenty years but now as I prepare to rest and say thanks one last time for today, how is the life eternal here… with… among?
I think what I am getting at here is I want to be about longer hugs. These are the kind that melt our insecurities and invite us to know in this moment-its going to be alright. When twenty years have passed then another twenty then another and I am eight I will have hoped to give longer hugs.
