Our lives are bound by gravity. In the physical sense it means our feet stay solidly attached to the ground. Our bodies bend to that gravity, though some of us turn to advances in medical science to defy it. At the end of the day, and of our lives, gravity ultimately wins and we return to the earth. Most of us choose not to think of or imagine how gravity will ultimately win and that is probably good. It’s a large, distant, difficult thought to grapple with in the midst of the daily struggle that is being alive on this earth.
Throughout my life I have made cultivating friendships a priority. I am an extrovert and for a those with a certain sensibility I have a magnetic personality. I make it a point to ask probing questions about my friends lives, and share as deeply as they are comfortable about mine. At one point I think I could point to more than a dozen men that I would call close friends. And yet when the storms have come to my life the breadth of my friendships has been winnowed.
It is a commitment to enter another’s pain. And the gravity that bound us together, a shared value system around family, kids, and school just wasn’t enough to sustain when the F5 hit the ground and did its damage. We are a society that runs from pain and denies grief entirely. And for a subset of my friends this was the case. Flowers, a card, a call and that’s as much as they can enter. To enter that pain further would require an acknowledgment that there is pain in their own lives that they are actively wallpapering over in conversations, on Facebook and at work.
They are taken with the wind. The roots of the friendships were too shallow.
And yet other friendships have been deepened. Those friends have entered the pain because they’ve lived through their own storm and that gravity of shared values pulls us tighter. They are the brave few willing to see the world as not a safe place, willing to not deny the pain in their lives, or minimize the challenges in their marriages and not constantly remodel their lives on Instagram by painting over the pain with pictures of perfect family vacations. They are willing to share the messiness of their human existence and enter into the messiness of ours. We share with each other the grief we feel when we look at our lives as they are and what they were intended to be. And by entering that pain we actually begin the process of building the life God intended for us.
And so I look at the world and think, the gravity by which we are bound socially is weak. Our relational gravity is far too shallow to hold us through the storms. Far too few friends and couples going deep enough into the pain that life brings us and sharing the knowing of the God who brings joy through that pain. As hard as it is to live through the death of a child, it is also equally hard to simply be present to the friend who lost them. And so it goes with every loss, be it a job, a parent, or a promotion. Being present to another’s pain takes work and generally dredges up pain in our own lives. That, however uncomfortable, is the only source of true joy in our lives as we drop the pretense, the façade, the construct, the ego…whatever you want to call it. We share our story boldly and listen to others intently and we enter a joy that God has created for us when we begin to discover our true selves which can only happen in community.
This is the gravity that will hold us together. The gravity of our true selves revealed and revealing. Our friendships compel us ever deeper into the mystical.
And that is a gravity of an entirely different sort.
