Then there were roses

Or love never fails...

So I won’t skirt around the issue at hand, which is that I found God. About a year ago, except I have come to understand that God was there all along. Barriers fell; someone threw a rope ladder down from heaven. I confided in a sweet, good and godly Capuchin friar. Roses were scattered.

Seriously.

Then I thought great, now I will have to inhabit the persona of a Bible-bolstered Christian convert. No-one will want to read what I’ve written because I will have become a God-nut. People don’t like that. I may try to turn everything back to God, like a guileless Willow branch bending in a Spring storm. I’ll ask: Have you prayed yet? Really, have you tried it?

I’ve felt filled up with love for months now. Before that, blocked by hate and resentment, which slowly crumbled out of me like an old scab peeling off a dried-up wound, the more definitively I surrendered myself to God.

I have also wondered if I am dying, such has been my obsession and subsequent inexplicable comfort with the wonder of letting God love me. As I am, not as I would be.

There was a giving up of problems which could also be justly described as passing the buck - there’s been an avalanche of ‘Ok, smarty pants God. You deal with it then. I can’t.’

And then it’s dealt with.

Seriously.

What does it all mean?

It doesn’t have to mean anything. Or it can mean everything. I’ve thought: I’ll lose friends over this. Those who see a different kind of God, those who don’t see God, those who are indifferent to God. Those who are offended by the notion of God.

But each day I surrender myself again and again, and each day the phrase ‘For my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:30)’ wipes more smudge off the cloudy crystal of my soul. It’s true.

All the God questions I had (Where are you? Why are a lot of things down here a shit show? Is there a reason I was born so administratively incompetent? WTF re AI?) are quietened because I don’t need to know the answers anymore.

I just want to rest, not in a RIP way, but in a profound and relaxing breaststroke in clear green waters (my favourite) way. You know, plant the seeds. Smell the flowers. Lean in when the Dunnes’ checkout lady wants to chat. Not just lean in - I mean sit down and get my nails done with her, and listen about how her father-in-law got sepsis after he cleaned out the fish tank with a tiny cut on his hand but he’s ok now.

I want to talk further with Paula, the grandmother I met at Church who doesn’t speak English and just left her whole life behind in Bergamo because she wants to live out the rest of her days near her daughter here in the smoggy wet thick of Dublin city. She’s lonely.

I want to hear my eldest boy’s ever-deepening baritone that foreshadows the man desperately trying to claw out of his beautiful budding pubescent self, my middle boy’s gentle whispering as he masterminds War & Peace with teeny tiny micromallows, my youngest son’s tongue trying to fold around impressive words of which he may or may not know the meaning. And I want to, for as many days a week as is dietetically advisable, watch all three children eating chocolate cake freshly baked by me, because that makes me happy and I have this one recipe that never fails.

I want to slow dance more with my poodle, a strange set of affairs that came about yesterday as I picked up this scrappy nervy fluffball to dampen a manic barking fit then segued into a satisfyingly extended cuddle as I swayed to The Cure’s Lullaby.

I want forests (always), robins’ nests, warm glasses of red wine in front of a crackling fire after long, long walks on wind-whipped beaches replete with violent and exuberant waves.

I want - I want - I want to stop wanting.

I want to stop. Like I said, and I underline this, not in an RIP way. In a lying on the grass looking up at the sky way, ants busying themselves around me, bees buzzing over me, wood thrushes fluting their sonorous songs in the wise old Oaks beside me.

There is no want when you are filled with love. Or, your childish want, like a large squishy ball popping incessantly out of its carefully constructed adult box, is diminished like a discarded fragment of a long-popped balloon.

But here is the test.

What is to be done with such love, if it is real, aka the real deal?

You get filled up with love for a reason. And it has absolutely nothing to do with yourself. Dare keep it within and it will disintegrate like candy floss in an eager tot’s dear little hand.

The love is not for you: it is for everyone else.