Attempts at loving: Blessing every opening
In this, the final of four excerpts from author and Fetzer Program Officer, Mark Nepo’s Facing the Lion, Being the Lion, he shares “Attempts at Loving.”
The third story comes from my good friend, George. He just returned from Bali. Still jet-lagged, his eyes are incredibly clear. And the image he’s carried back, the one he is eager to speak of, is of Hindu women flowing in their sarongs, wearing wide-brimmed hats filled with small bowls woven of palm and banana leaves. Each bowl is filled with a handful of rice and topped with a few petals. Every day, they deliver these throughout the village. One by one, they cup each bowl into place, into every opening they can find, as an offering to the gods that everyone feels but which no one can see. Every day, these kind people leave their little offerings in doorways, in stairwells, on roads, on windowsills, on the black sand that rims the sea. They place the tiny woven bowls so carefully that even the gods have to bow to inhale the gift.
George and I talk about this for quite some time. He is struck by the way these simple quiet people aren’t saying they are grateful but are being grateful and how these gestures soften the climate. It makes me wonder, what if we teach the children how to bless every opening, how to bow to every threshold? What if we slip it in between when they learn how to tie their shoes and how to count? In a generation’s time, would our fear of each other quiet down? Would we celebrate the unexpected? What if we were to place such a small bowl at each other’s feet? What if we were to treat each other as openings to be blessed every day?
It seems the act of blessing is a lesson we have to earn, and for this reason it is not really hidden but allowed by grace to grow where it is still difficult for us to spoil. And so, somewhere in the midst of four hundred islands that we call Indonesia, thirteen time zones away, on a small island of black sand, in the north away from the thirsty tourists, the elegant women of Bali quietly place the small bowls of rice and flowers at your door before you wake to bless the opening we call the day. Such a simple secret, one that God has tucked away till we are vulnerable enough to find it.
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