love’s hem

On my way to IJM training in D.C. last September, I borrowed a book from my parents for the plane ride. “Consider This, Senora.” An urgent, almost bossy title, I thought then. On the cover, a chalky sun rose over a dusty desert. I put it in my carry on bag. Maybe I’d read it, I thought then, but maybe I won’t, either.

Book in hand, I left Minneapolis for D.C. at six a.m. Despite the early hour, a “Chatty Kathy” in cat-eye glasses talked my ear off. As she spoke, I tried to listen and at the same time muse about what the IJM training would be like. I glanced at the towering clouds out the window. I remembered then, as I always do on airplanes, the disappointment of having made the discovery as a little girl that I couldn’t sit on clouds.

Chatty Kathy dozed off. I opened the book. “Consider this, Senora.” I sipped on V8 and read. It was good, not great, I thought. Then I came to a certain section which gave me pause.

It went like this. A very elderly lady is pressing her fingers into avocados in a Mexican market, trying to find the ripest ones. She is thinking about her husband, who has recently died — how good he was to her, how kind, and how tender. And she knows “surely, she had brushed against the hem of Love.”

I found I liked this phrase for a few reasons. “Brushed” has both a sound and a touch to it — I liked that. I also recognized, and responded to, the idea of a transformative encounter. I myself have had them, and I’ll bet you have too. You know what I mean– a brief burst of emotion takes you by surprise, but even though fleeting still leaves you with the certainty you have touched something infinite. You try to talk about it with your friends after, but you fumble with your words. In the aftermath of such an experience, words seem vaporous as clouds, and inadequate.

Throughout IJM training week, as I went from here to there in my newly acquired business suits, I kept thinking about that phrase — “brushed up against the hem of love.” I thought about it when I learned about young girls being rescued from brothels. I thought about it when I saw pictures of enslaved families walking free from quarries. I thought about it when I heard tales of innocent men fleeing prison cells where they’d languished for years. For all these victims, the moment of actual rescue is momentar . Intense, and then gone. Yet, in the aftermath, everything is different. The big and powerful force behind the rescue, the muscular love that prompted people to intervene for you, changes your life forever.

Since coming to Uganda, I have had occasion to think a lot more about this phrase. I have seen love expressed in new ways all the time, so much so that I’ve been rendered speechless . Haven’t known what to say, blogosphere. Whether it is a tiny girl in a ragged princess dress kneeling in the dust to share her tiny lunch with me, or a widow giving me all her pototoes, or my friend MS-K helping me move all my worldly possessions time and time again –or my friend AW pouring himself out for devastated communities in the Congo — I have encountered love in a heightened way. My senses are more finely attuned to it. The landscape has shifted for me.

Have you had a period in your life like this? When have you seen something and thought, “There. Right there – that’s what love is? “ And it made you laugh with gladness — or maybe shook you to the core.

One final thought The ‘hem of love’ reminds me (as it is perhaps intended to) of that woman in the gospels who couldn’t stop bleeding. Society rejected her because of her disease. She was an ‘untouchable.’ Then, one day, she saw an unremarkable looking man. She had a feeling about him. Jesus. She knew she had to get to him, and not sometime, but right now. So she wended her way through a crazy, sweaty crowd to touch the hem of his clothing. Just a corner would serve her purpose.. She lunged forward, just grazing the fabric. And felt something go through her — only she knows what it felt like. Peace, maybe. Lightning. Jesus went away, then, and she maybe never saw him again. Still, who he was — and how he regarded her — as worthy of healing — as a child of God — worked in her for the rest of her life.

As I prepare to leave this place in six weeks, I realize that I am clinging to the euphoric moment when I’ve grabbed the savior’s hem. I want to be caught by the euphoria, not to be talking about it after. These days, I feel like I am watching a loved one’s back get smaller and smaller in the distance. I am clutching a bit, clinging. God has done a big work in me this year, and I know I’ll always be different because of it. I’ve slipped the bounds of my fixed life, and found love more extended, multiple and various than I had imagined. But I still don’t want to say goodbye to Uganda so soon.

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