Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: The Front Porch of Your Heart

Dear Hilary,

I'm graduating. There, I said it. I hate saying it. I'm leaving people that I love. I'm leaving relationships that are new and fragile, that have had life for so little time. What if they fall apart? What if when I leave, I can't keep all these people in my heart, or in my life? What do I do when I have to say goodbye and I know it's the end, and the chances of seeing them again are so small, barely even real? They're going. I'm staying. We're all leaving.

Love,
Leaving

Dear Leaving,

For a long time now, I have described my heart as a house. I talked about the rooms I build for people, according to what I know about them. Some rooms are living rooms with soft white couches and lots of blankets, rooms for the people I love to curl up and be safe. Other rooms are decorated like jungles and are filled with unexpected treasures, because those people love to adventure and imagine. And still other rooms are kitchens where we sit at old wooden tables and drink tea and tell stories. I want my heart to be like coming home to people. I want to carry hearts in my heart. I want to love by building a place for you, with your name on it.

The beautiful thing about this metaphor is that it helps describe the agony of departure, and the hope. Sometimes people move out of my heart. I come back to their room and discover that they've packed boxes, erased their name from the door. I walk through the empty space and I remember, and it breaks my heart. And I know there are people I've hurt in the same way, packed my own boxes and moved out without telling them, without a word of goodbye. This is heartbreak: to discover that sometimes, we cannot live in the hearts of those we love. Sometimes, we must say goodbye. 

So here you are, in the house of your heart. And there are boxes everywhere, people shuffling, unpacking, repacking, sitting on the floor and laughing or crying or drinking red wine straight from the bottle. There is no certainty who is going where. There is no certainty whether the people you love now will be there forever, and I urge you to accept this as a part of it all. A part of living, even a part of loving.

So I come to my words to you today: let people linger on the front porch of your heart. 

Leave your lights on. Make sweet tea and lemonade and let the people you love, who are so new to your life, pull up chairs or a bit of dusty floor and stay for a while. Don't rush them out because you're afraid they'll break your heart with their leaving. Don't hide from people. Don't overplan how each conversation will go and what you will say and do.

Instead, spend these next ten days on the front porch of your heart, and love fully the people who are there. Maybe they will move into the house in the next six months. Maybe you just get ten days with them. Maybe it's something in between. But let them sit with you on that front porch and love them.

None of you yet know whose heart you will carry for how long. None of you yet know who you will become to each other. It's terrifying to think that you could care for someone who won't be in your life later. That will always be true. But it's also always true that they are worth knowing for those ten days. People are worth sitting with on the front porch of your heart, always.

So let them linger there, and love them fully. I promise the home of your heart is richer and more beautiful for it.

Love, always,
Hilary

i pray for peace of heart, letter thirty-one, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

When I woke up late this morning, only fifteen short minutes to race through clothes and shoes and coats, water splashed across my eyelids and books hastily gathered, I remembered this prayer. I found it years ago when I was convinced God meant me to be Catholic, and I wanted to verify that there was beauty in the Catholic Church - the beauty of prayer life, of meditation, of slowness.

Almighty and Eternal God,
Give me, I beseech You,
the great gift of inward peace.
Command the winds and storms
of my unruly passions.
Subdue, by Your grace, 
my proneness to love 
created things too much.
Give me a love of suffering for Your sake.
make me forbearing and kind to others,
that I may avoid quarrels and contentions.
And teach me constantly to seek after
and to acquire that perfect resignation
to Your Holy Will
which alone brings interior peace.
Amen. 

The prayer is for "peace of heart." Isn't that beautiful? How rarely do we think of peace as the great gift? How rarely do we beg God for it?

I have to confess to you, these last few weeks of school feel anything but peaceful. They are swelling with urgency and with ending, with the harsh tick of the clock, with the insistent reminders of countdowns and "senior formal" dress shopping and plans for reading day. I'm swimming through the hours wondering how there could ever be peace amid these last few weeks.

And to confess even more, I don't know how to want to pray for peace. My whole life I've loved the hurricane. I love the passionate, intense, everything-is-caught-up-in-everything feeling. I love the rush of feeling you get when you start to consider, and wonder about, everything that's going on inside your heart and head.

But it's not by harshness that our God subdues my proneness to choose His creation over Him. It's not be strict, unloving commandments, or by anger or wrath. He subdues what is unhealthy in us by grace. He offers us Himself and His love as the answer to our winds and storms.

I don't know if there is anything more beautiful than this kind of grace. The grace that teaches and leads. The grace that walks onto the water and rebukes it. This, this is the One who teaches us peace. 


And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in jeopardy. And they came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!”

Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. But He said to them, “Where is your faith?”

And they were afraid, and marveled, saying to one another, “Who can this be? For He commands even the winds and water, and they obey Him!”

I know His name, Preston. I'm only at the very beginning of knowing who this is who commands the winds and storms of my unruly passions, but I can hear Him command them. I can hear His grace rebuke the wind and the raging water. 

And today, I pray for you. I pray that God would give you the great gift of inward peace. I pray that His grace would command your winds and storms. I pray that the love of Christ Jesus would astound you with its depth and breadth and height. I pray for peace of heart. 

Love,

Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: Trust The Poets

Dear Hilary,

How do you trust your gut? Is our intuition right about things? What if it deceives us, what if my heart deceives me, says one thing and means another, promises I'll be okay when I'm not? What if I ache in one moment and laugh in another? And all the while I can't tell whether what I'm doing is good for my heart or terrible for it? Have you ever been afraid of breaking your own heart?

Love,
Heart Thumping

Dear Heart,

You are a dear heart. So bold and blunt. So unsure. So full of life that you can't help but let these questions tumble out of you and onto the page. You sound so much at the beginning of learning lessons about your heart, and what it can bear, and how to know that.

I've always been a little afraid of breaking my own heart. I've done it enough times now to know the feelings - a slow, steady ache that works its way up through my hip bones and my lungs and rests there, inside my ribcage. I know how my head starts to remind me of how stupid I was, how the decisions I made were my fault, how this awful twisting inside my body is the result of my own foolishness. I know how the stories start to spin around like small hurricanes and suddenly everything looks wrong, looks like it hurts, looks like it is broken.

So, dear heart. You who are bold and blunt and afraid of breaking. My only advice to you is to go slow. Do not be quick to tell yourself you know the ending to the story. Do not be quick to blame yourself for the ache. If the ache arrives, welcome it - it has something to teach you. It can soften you and make you tender. It can give you courage. You write in such dichotomies - good versus terrible, saying versus meaning, ache versus laughter.

I don't think those are ever as separate as we wish them.

Our hearts are built to hold inside them all the uncertain and the certain, the good and the terrible, the ache and the laughter. We need not tell ourselves to feel only one thing, or to banish difficult emotions when we see them coming. They, too, belong to us. I don't think we're meant to be governed by these feelings, whether easy to bear or difficult. I don't think necessarily our hearts should be dictators. If anything, they are gentle leaders, leading us out towards love and towards compassion.

I trust my gut because ultimately? Even the most agonizing experiences soften and shape us. Even the things we do not believe we can bear become a part of who we are. And we cannot know what those will be, we cannot know what will happen tomorrow or the next year or the next decade. So we must hold the future lightly, and love the present fiercely. Trust that if you are yearning for the truth and living out love, then you have nothing to fear.

I titled this column to you, "Trust the Poets" because they're the ones who teach me this lesson. They teach me how to peer inside my own heart and love what is there, whether it is easy or difficult, whether it is joy or ache or both together. I think the poets, the real ones, have always called us towards more courage when it comes to this. Courage to love fully. Courage to trust the unseen. Courage to let our hearts break and bend and expand.

Can I leave you with this poem, one that I fell in love with not too long ago? I think it will help you.

Love, all of it,
Hilary

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.