Love is Smiling Through All Things

A friend recently told me that one of her goals in this middle stage of life is to learn how to live with an “undefended heart.” That struck me as an interesting and somehow essential way of putting it. It was term that I resolved to ponder more deeply. An undefended heart. What a thing to be able to say one has amid all the pain we endure and inflict upon each other. What a ballast for a world so riven by division and chaos, deceit and manipulation.

I doubt I am alone in saying that defending my heart comes easily and naturally. We all pick up wounds and resentments over the years. It can be easy to feel misunderstood, mistreated, taken advantage of, ignored. It’s oh so easy to feel like our motives and actions and ideas and positions are laudable and beyond reproach while scrutinizing and overanalyzing and simplifying everyone else’s (usually through the lens of how they affect us). It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to protect ourselves from the things that life and other people throw our way. To lock oneself away, to never take a risk, to withhold trust, to have self-protection as one’s default mode of engaging with the world.

In Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life, there’s a scene where the mother (Jessica Chastain) speaks the following words in the background:

The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.

Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries.

Nature only wants to please itself, to get others to please it too, to love and to admire it. Nature likes to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things.

They taught us that no one who loves the way of Grace ever comes to a bad end.

Perhaps trying to live with an “undefended heart” is just another way of choosing the way of Grace.

Nature does indeed like to have its own way. And yes, it can easily find reasons to be unhappy even love is smiling through all things. Grace is certainly the better way. And I do believe, despite a mountain of little protests and examples and “what-abouts” and “yeah buts” that no one who loves this way ultimately comes to a bad end.

That word “ultimately,” of course, is doing a lot of the work. Living with an undefended heart, choosing the way of Grace demands a horizon as long and as wide as the God’s the Love that is smiling through all things.

Image source.