This is not the blog planned for today. That one may be revamped for sometime later this week.
No, I need to get back to the topic of "love." It's a word that I know I never understood until sometime in year 59, not really, and maybe not even until last night. I watched the movie, Saving Mr. Banks -- a really beautiful film about the unlikely collaboration between ultra-stuffy, British P.L. Travers, the female author of Mary Poppins, and Walt Disney, as the film was being made back in the early 60's. I don't think it gives away the plot to say that her heart "melts" during the course of the film, and I had an odd parallel experience after watching it. Initially, dozens of childhood memories played through on my own inner movie screen, including seeing the movie at Proctor's Theatre in downtown Schenectady when it came out. My own love for things English had started by the time I saw Mary Poppins, but I am sure sitting in the seats of that glorious theatre with a bag of popcorn, listening to Julie Andrews singing, cemented it.
The next few sentences take more courage to write than any I have ever written. I have always taken a pretty intellectual approach to religion and my Christian heritage, studying it more like a scholar and singing its music like a musician. While clearly having mystical sensibilities, I have never understood people having a personal "relationship" to God or Jesus. In recent years as I have explored New Age/New Thought/Law of Attraction spirituality, I have still struggled to really connect to the divine on a heart level. I could make "sense" of the energy of the universe being like a river of love and passion, and could see intellectually how that leads to more and more growth in the world. But none of my theoretical conclusions had yet really hit home. I still felt as if my little life was invisible to the divine, and that I was in this river without a life vest, to splash and scramble around on my own, sink-or-swim style, with random waves buffeting me.
So as I was preparing to go to sleep, to almost audibly hear the words, "We love you and we will support you" and to know that this message was coming from some divine plane, really threw me. I knew "we" to be sort of a cosmic crowd, all the various ways that God is represented, and every holy being that I've ever heard of, particularly the female saints and mystics I used to read about as a kid (and St. Valeria, to whom the piece of music I studied for my master's was dedicated.) It was like all of a sudden, I became aware of a cheering section that was cheering me on! I could feel them around me. I could feel love. In the last scene of Saving Mr. Banks, you literally see Emma Thompson (Travers) tearfully catching up with her own humanity, and maybe if someone had seen me last night a few hours after the video was turned off, they might have seen a similar thing.
This week, too many of my friends and their family members are undergoing challenging medical situations. Healing is a "whole 'nother" topic for another day, but I am sitting here this minute bursting with such love for these friends, and others who have made my unconventional path a little smoother. I have rarely actually been alone. It's just that I felt alone in the universe. Until last night.
