THE BELOVED

Winter, 2008

An elderly man, married for over 60 years, witnesses the changes in his wife as her health declines.  Her body shrivels with pain.  Her mind forgets things he always depended on her to remember.  Her energy gives out.  She sometimes snaps at him, expects more of him than he can deliver and then criticizes him. 

One day one of his children visits, and sees him jumping to his wife’s every beck and call, submitting himself to her impossible demands, failing to stand up for himself.  Catching him alone, the adult child asks, “What are you doing, Dad?”  The old man straightens up so he can look his grown child in the eye, and says, “I don’t want you—or anyone—to see your mother like this. What you see here today is not the woman I have been married to all this time.  That woman loved me.  She loved me fiercely and gently and faithfully.  I still love that woman, and she’s the one I am serving.”

What looked like passive behavior turned out to be the stuff of enlightenment.  The old man knew what he was doing, and for whom he was doing it.   

Fairy tales provide a peek into the workings of the human psyche.  A common theme is one of a hero finding his beloved.  Sometimes the hero doesn’t recognize his beloved the first time around.  This leads to perilous tasks and taxing journeys meant to open his eyes. 

When the beloved is perceived, it sometimes turns elusive, transforming into a scullery maid or a fool, a monster or an owl.  Then the hero has to wash the beloved in milk, or burn the bewitching skin that disguised it, or marry it in its ugly, despised form.

As humans, we have a psychological task of discovering our beloved and then hanging onto it, whatever that requires of us.  We are asked to hold out for our dreams—romantic, vocational, political—and not just settle for the pleasures of the moment.

In the above story, the beloved is a person.  It can also be an ideal or a cause, a creative work or a place, a concept or a thing.  It is what we live for.

I recently took a handsaw in for sharpening.  The saw is so old that most places don’t have the equipment needed for sharpening it.  I was finally told to go to a tiny shop in Bowness.  When I entered the door, the lone worker in the place shut off his machine, removed his goggles and wiped his hands on his soiled apron.  He came to the counter, where I had placed my saw.  He leaned over it, then lifted it reverently in his big hands.  “Ahhh,” he said, “a real Disston saw.”  It felt like a holy moment. 

And so it is, when a lover bends over his beloved. 

I left this man’s shop feeling greater hope for the world and encouragement in my own love.  Being in the presence of someone who claims his beloved makes a difference...no matter who or what the beloved is.