Today Lynette and I celebrate our fourteen years of discovering our own ways of reflecting God’s relationality. Fourteen years sounds like a long time to me but it sure hasn’t felt like a long time. In fact it’s hard to imagine that this isn’t exactly the way life is meant to be lived.
I believe that our relationship is a living being. I’ve talked about this before, but I believe that the “us” of Lynette and Dwight is a unique, living, dynamic “person.” I have the same struggles using person to describe “us” that many theologians have in using person to describe God’s Holy Spirit. Is “us” a person, an essence, an ethos, a link, a relationship? “Us” is personal, it is knowable, it can be grieved, it unifies, it empowers, it convicts, it purifies, it gives life, it teaches, it comforts, etc. In fact “us” is the primary gift that Lynette and I can leave with our son.
You may jump the conclusion that I am a diehard Augustinian with his “bond of love” concept. Though I highly value Augustine’s contribution here, I do feel this contribution works better in reframing anthropology in relational terms than understanding the Trinity. In terms of God’s relationality I’d want to go further east.
Lynette, happy anniversary! Thanks again for graciously offering yourself to me, in spite of my seemingly endless theologizing, my odd mix of intensity/goofiness and my tenacious buying of books. Thanks for writing haiku, and desiring a life. Thanks for really looking at Pascal. Thanks for sharing snippets from your readings, and for your loving deconstruction. Thanks for still seeing me, and touching me, and for making me feel like a strong man.
Today let’s honor “Us.” We are!
Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Love you, dwight
