What if you catch a glimpse?
The Great Tenderness is always with us
Once in a rare moon, I get a flash of what you might call The Great Tenderness. A not-enough name for how we are buoyed, all of us, by mercy vast and far beyond ourselves. In an instant I can see it—our beautiful brazen belovedness—but as quickly as it comes, the knowing is gone.
Like today on the plane, all of us zoning and zooming through air, hurtling through time and space at 500 miles a blessed hour. And sure, you could blame it on the film I was watching, a stirring story of love and music and grief, the art that burnishes your tarnished faith. Yet I’ve watched a hundred movies like that, and not all of them leave you Seeing. Except this one did, or maybe it was simply the startling suspension between heaven and earth that nudges you nearer our God to Thee.
But for a whole holy moment, I felt it, saw it, caught it, knew it in my bones—except I can’t quite say what It was. I’ve been puzzling over it for five full minutes (not so long in the hurried history of humanity, but an awful long time when you’re alone on a plane and the moment is slipping away like water through fingers while the man three rows up is watching news on his seat screen and a game on his phone at the same time, and good God, is this how we live now?).
Except that’s exactly what it is: a fleeting and frail and fumbling knowing as ineffable as the words you are trying to cluster around the experience. Not an emotion exactly or an intellectual insight—only a flash in the soul. The lightning sear of seeing. The Something Holding All Of Us. The whole. The holy.
You know the entire messy lot of everyone, on board and below, is a ragged restless wreck, ugliness crawling inside and out, how often we hurt each other, by intent or ignorance, and how the wounds throb and throb. But at the same time, right alongside the grief and grime of us is the glow and genuine certainty of More-Than-Us. The Love That Makes Us Whole.
Maybe I could try to tell the man in row 17 but instead I will tell you (or try to anyway) because I have a strong solid hunch that you have glimpsed it, too. The goodness that holds us and the glory that awaits us.
So much I do not know, how the messes we have made will work out for any of us, what terrors and tribulations might await as we tumble toward the end. But what I do know is that even that ending is Held—so it is not the last. Love has the final word, Love is the final word. And maybe, just maybe, the more we set down our screens and look up from our own lives, the more we will catch the glimmering glorious glimpses that promise we are lightyears beyond all we can see.
Only now, you see, the man in 17C has turned off both screens, a change of heart (or conversion?) in the time it took to type these words. Now he is leaning his head on the shoulder of whomever is next to him, spouse or child or friend, who could say. Now the angle from his shoulder to the other’s hat is a perfect slant, so it looks like they are one person in two seats. And that alone—the miracle of reconnection and the memory of origin—makes me realize that the same truth is always sitting right next to us, waiting for us to shut off distraction and division, to close our eyes and rest back into waiting arms. The Great Tenderness of truth that no matter where we go, no matter how far or lost or lonely, Love has always been right next door.
Look: I paused a FANTASTIC film (The Ballad of Wallis Island) when I caught this mid-air glimpse, and the words tumbled out right as you read them here. If I listened to the experts, I’d put this extra essay/prose poem/whatever behind the paywall to entice you to “buy it.” But I’m so weary of the world and its ways: I just want to share whatever I’m given, in case the words might catch a flash of Light for you, too. So please know: those of you who can give as paid subscribers to make this work come to life, I want to thank you with extra offerings—and will keep doing that. But I’m also even more grateful that you make it possible for me to share an extra gift gratis for everyone here. Exactly what this holy moment was and might still be, if it keeps rippling outward and nudging us to keep our eyes open. Feel free to share it with a friend today. Thanks for being here.
One glorious night decades ago on a late flight to Minneapolis, the pilot came on and said the moon was so full and bright, he was turning off lights for one minute in cabin and slightly turning plane. the moonlight flooded the cabin- people gasped and all was silent for a most holy moment.No cameras or phones existed to capture the momeny- only our hearts.
Experiencing a grief bomb over the last 24 hours - a parent’s death, a child’s marriage ending, and a worsening health diagnosis for a loved one. Your comment about The Something Holding All Of Us pierced my heart. 🥺. Thank you.