Love is for the weak

Imperfect. Photo by Dan Iggers

“Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else.”
-- St. Therese Lisieux

Love is for the weak, who cry from bed for water though the nightstand holds a glass.

Love is for the hunted, who chew their cuds in open glades, forgetting they are prey.

Love is for the brittle, who snap at slightest pressure, crack, and clatter to the floor.

Love is for the wounded, who slump against the barricades and weep to lift the flag.

Love is for the dim, who do their homework every night and always get it wrong.

Love is for the lost, who dropped their map 10 miles back and can’t recall the turn.

Love is for the snitch and the stool pigeon, the turncoat and the tattletale, the liar and the loser. It is for the snookered, the cynical, the spooked. The shivering and the shabby, cranky and conceited, bloated and boorish. Love is for the slack-jawed, cross-eyed, weak-kneed, yellow-bellied, chicken-livered folks. For the bland. The forgettable. The forgotten.

Love is for those who say they don’t want it, and for those who won’t say they need it.

Love is for anyone but the whole.


Prayer #279: Let Us Love

I can never love as You love -- a gulping love, a saturating love, an inundating love we call "love" only because we have no other word to capture the deluge. No, I am merely a chipped cup, long emptied of unmemorable contents, now gathering dust in a neglected cabinet, alone except for the cobwebs.

But even in this forgotten corner, pour out of me what I don’t think I have. Let me sit filled, because I’m not alone, not really. Millions of hands jostle just outside the handle, blindly groping for something, anything, to slake their thirst, and all I need do is inch closer and nudge open the door.

Amen.