The Same Fire (Part 2)
What Is There, Except Each Other?
This is Part 2. If you haven’t read Part 1, I’d start there for the full ride.
It’s nearly dawn in upstate New York. The aurora has faded, but I’m still awake, scrolling through video from a month of zigzagging between Minneapolis, Memphis, Des Moines, and Driggs, Idaho. Toni is asleep on the tattered sofa, a blanket pulled over her shoulders. On my laptop screen, the faces and voices of faithful people we’ve met along the road flicker in the darkened room, and I’m listening for the common chord I know is there, beneath the different keys in which they sing.
What I hear isn’t doctrine. It isn’t scripture or theology. It’s something simpler and more stubborn than any of those things. It’s the sound of people who have built their lives around love trying to describe what it feels like from the inside.
Elam Noor, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Baha’i.
We’d met Elam, his wife Katie, and their newborn son at the Walker Art Center. A creative tech educator with an easy laugh and a mind that moved fast enough to surprise even himself:
Baha’is believe that when you’re in this world, when you’re growing and going through life, you’re actually developing the spiritual tools you need to survive in the next world, much in the way that when a baby is growing in its mother’s womb and it’s developing eyes and hands and ears, it doesn’t actually need them when it’s in the womb. Those things aren’t important for the place where they are at the time. They’re important for after, when they’re born. Baha’is believe that we’re similarly developing the tools, like a better understanding of love, that we’ll need in the next world.
We also firmly believe that in marriage, the bond of love that you make is permanent; it’s connected to your soul. And while I’m not as spiritual a person as I probably need to be to really understand it, I find comfort in that. I think I just realized that the clarity and beauty you find in love, like in my relationship with my wife, Katie, is how I reconcile the conflict between the complexity I see in life and the simplicity of what love ultimately offers. It grounds me amid the chaos. See there, I just made a new tool! That makes me happy. [laughs]
It also makes me think that people are fussy and different and some aren’t interested in love, no matter how interested it may be in them. Which is kind of sad, because love is the key to happiness. I like to hope that most people are happy where they are and that they change when they aren’t; they try to find something. Finding faith and especially love as a part of that faith are really good ways of personally changing things for the better. So, love is simple, even if people are complicated.
Emily Guenther (Rev. Omma), The Broom Closet, Memphis, Tennessee. Wiccan.
Rev. Omma’s shop was exactly the kind of place you’d miss if you were driving too fast, which is one of many reasons we ride motorcycles:
Love is how we save the world. We all know what’s going on out there; just the environment, politics, local things. It’s overwhelming. I feel it whenever I watch the news, and I hear people talk. I’m overwhelmed and I feel like I can’t process any more of it and I know I’m not alone in that. But it is still true, even though it may sound trite and too small to make a difference against all that, that being kind, being loving, being open and willing to make friends, and just seeing things from other perspectives really does change the world around us. Very slowly. It’s water moving a mountain, but it’s also contagious. And if we can make even a small difference in one person with all that and then they pass it along, eventually, we make changes and we see the good.
Love ripples outward like that. It’s an ever-expanding circle, and as Wiccans and pagans, we’re all about circles, you know. [laughs] And it doesn’t have to be anything big because a lot of our beliefs have to do with just being present. Like we say, “be here now” during our circles, and day to day, that just means I hold doors open for people, I look people in the eye, smile, and say thank you, and you can kind of see the small gratitude in people when they realize, “Oh hey, she saw me.” There’s power in being acknowledged, and it’s just a little bit of love that everyone needs and deserves. I guess you could say that love is being aware, listening, and knowing that we’re all humans who just want enough to eat, somewhere to feel safe, someone to be with, a dog or cat, and maybe some better insurance. [laughs]
Jed and Katie Mumm, The Spud Drive-In Theatre, Driggs, Idaho. LDS.
We’d ridden to Driggs partly to see the Tetons from their less-visited Idaho side and partly because someone in Jackson Hole had told us, “You’ve got to meet the Mumms.” They were right.
Katie: Love isn’t something you find; it’s something you make. And like anything else, the more you work at it, the more satisfaction you find in it, the more joy there is in it.
Jed: Yeah, it’s like growing a garden. A well-weeded garden grows better, right? Some people don’t see that because they expect that it’s something they’re going to find and there’s gonna be this “aha” moment when it clicks, and that’s not how it works.
Katie: We’re fortunate that we found it with each other because sharing our faith meant we already kind of knew what love really is to us, that it’s something created for us, and it’s eternal. But it’s also something that we’re expected to keep working on. And that’s like an everyday thing, not just something you find and then you’re like “happily-ever-after.” But the work is why it’s so much fun, too.
Jed: Believing in something bigger than us is a part of all that. It makes us patient to learn what the other person’s little things are, and help them grow and love them for whoever they are. That’s what it’s supposed to be; we’re not supposed to form people to this, or form them to that. It’s learning to love each other better and other people too, and that means helping them all grow. That kind of grows you too, you know? Like, we’re members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, so we also believe that families and friends that are like family are forever. Love is forever. Our wedding vows don’t say, “Until death do us part.” They end with “For time and all eternity.”
Katie: That’s why it’s so important that we take care of each other here. Because forever should be shared with someone special, and with as many people as you can make family, too.
I pull Toni’s blanket back over her where it’s slipped from her shoulder and finish transcribing one last interview. On the screen, in a Greek cafe called The Olympic Flame, nestled at the foot of the most architecturally impressive state capital building we’d yet encountered in Des Moines, Iowa, plays our encounter with Bhante Dhammapala.
A former traveling musician turned Theravada Buddhist monk, Bhante was a midwesterner built like a retired Marine. He draped the ample lap under his maroon kasaya robe with the restaurant’s linen napkin, a saffron t-shirt beneath completing the traditional monk’s colors while offering an urban-American sensibility. Seventy-year-old eyes glinting at us with good-natured mischief, we knew we were delightfully in over our heads following our first and usually quickest icebreaker question: “Do you believe in happily-ever-after?”
He replied that many people’s ideas about happiness are “goofy,” but then people are essentially goofy themselves. So, therefore, yes, such a thing was possible. But this, he said, is what he thought, not what he simply believed, because belief is a thoroughly goofy thing as well.
To hear Bhante talk so easily about love as he welcomed and gracefully humbled our questions was to delight in wisdom and laughter born of experience. His ideas and thoughts soared on between hearty grins and the smacking of kalamata olives. And when we asked his thoughts on the greatest love song ever written, he revealed that, as a former professional keyboard player and guitarist, he could never narrow his answer to a single song. Then he offered:
But there is a greatest ode to love, and that is 1 Corinthians 13: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Following our conversation, I’d neglected to switch off the camera, distracted by helping this smiling, erudite Buddhist monk find his lost pickup truck keys, which had fallen off the table and onto the windowsill next to the streetside booth where we’d chatted. Thanking him for his time, we paid our check and walked out onto the Grand Avenue sidewalk, where a street nomad played a guitar with a pearl-colored Star of David on the pickguard. He was singing My Sweet Lord, a George Harrison tune about Krishna.
In that shaky, sideways, accidental few minutes of video, I heard a Buddhist monk quote us Christian scripture in a cafe owned by a Greek Orthodox family, down the street from a pagan candle and crystal shop, while a Jewish kid crooned an ode to a Hindu god, written by a Roman Catholic who died a gnostic seeker.
It was nothing less than a symphony of love through faith, and my soul still smiles to have been a part of it all.
I finally shut down my computer screen. Dawn is here. The Hudson River Valley is filling with a light that feels, after a night spent with these voices, like something more than photons. Before sleep takes me, I find myself returning to the question I asked at the close of last week’s essay: if we gathered all these faithful people around one table, what would they agree on?
Riding southwest through Pennsylvania later that day, hoping to make it to Allentown in time for the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs’ minor league baseball game that evening, I let the question turn over in the miles. The road smooths out the noise and leaves the signal. Thinking back on their words and spirit, four things reveal themselves.
The first is that although faith uniquely shapes its believers’ paradigms and perspectives on love, as that love finds itself living in a world filled with people who believe differently, it becomes supported by their faith rather than ruled by it. Love becomes aspirational. Secure in knowing that love is the greatest hope and central tenet of their faith, strictures and dogmas become secondary to the existence and fundamental worth of love itself. For the faithful, love is the truth of God.
The second is that once love between us is acknowledged, differences in faith become conversations rather than divisions. Believers still exalt the uniqueness and benefits of their faith to others, and for many that evangelism is a requirement of faith itself. Yet, that outreach is understood as a gift offered in love, not a cause for building and defending walls. Answers to “What is love?” from the faithful, while founded on external religious beliefs, only find fullness within the heart, experience, and grace of their believers. Love through faith makes room for love in life, everyone’s life. For the faithful, love is fluid, a definite thing unto itself, but taking the form of the vessels into which it is poured.
The third is that God is love’s embodiment and ultimate expression, something commonly held between and within all the faiths we’ve encountered. And because God exists everywhere, in all things, and within each of us, for the faithful, love is universal.
The fourth reveals itself through a question we hear often on our Journeys: “Is love eternal?” It’s simple enough to conclude that if God is love and God is eternal, then love is eternal. But what people seem to mean when they ask is something more intimate: “Is the love between us forever?” Eternity is often misunderstood as “time without end.” But time is just a construct, a measurement of things, and like the span of years in a life, it must have both a beginning and an end. Eternity, the realm of the soul, has neither. For the faithful, love dwells both within lifetimes and after. It is a constant and immortal presence that we experience, for now, through a mortal existence. While we are here, love happens, but its happening cannot be measured. So, instead of hours, days, months, years, lifetimes, and centuries, love is described in “moments.” They are the spaces out of time: the moment a couple knows they’ve found themselves in one another; the moment one finds Enlightenment or Christ, realizes a dream, or discovers a truth long sought. Those moments are when we experience love’s transcendent nature and, for believers, the full expression of their faith. It affirms and inspires the soul, nurturing it and remaining with it forever. For the faithful, life is fleeting and the soul is eternal, but love is timeless.
Four truths held in common by people whose faiths, scriptures, traditions, and histories could scarcely be more different. A Baptist pastor in Alabama, a rabbi in Montgomery, a Muslim couple in Iowa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in New York, a Baha’i father in Minneapolis, a Wiccan priestess in Memphis, a Mormon couple in Idaho, and a Marine-turned-monk in a Greek cafe in Des Moines. They worship differently, pray differently, celebrate differently, grieve differently. And yet, when asked what love is, they circle the same fire.
Love is the truth of God. Love is fluid. Love is universal. Love is timeless.
That’s what a symphony of love through faith sounds like. Not unison.
Harmony.
A Map of Souls is a forthcoming book exploring the origin, nature, and purpose of love through 100,000 miles of motorcycle journeys across America. The Cartographer’s Log shares stories, encounters, and reflections from that road.